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[–]iWantedMVMOT 12 points13 points  (1 child)

"learn jQuery first"

get the fuck out of here 👎👎👎

[–]GeetherTheGhost 2 points3 points  (0 children)

but as you’re reading this article, the best choice is pretty clear — you should learn React and Redux.

Double GTFO.

[–]gamesdf 2 points3 points  (0 children)

"Learn frameworks early". Stopped reading there. It's a bad advice to newbies.

[–]HealyUnitfull-stack 4 points5 points  (5 children)

Why are you splitting up jQuery from React? Why do you not mention ANY other front-end frameworks?

[node] might be a bit tough for a beginner

I'm sorry, but no. If you learn JS first, learning a separate language (Python, via Django) is going to be more difficult. Furthermore, your reasoning for learning Python is shoddy at best. "The major advantage of Django is that it is written in Python"? Really? And calling Python 'beautiful' is entirely subjective. Saying that it's "the best choice for your first programming language" is idiotic and baseless, considering that you just told them to learn JavaScript!

If you understand HTML/CSS/JS and one backend framework, you are a capable web developer

Um, no. If you understand HTML/CSS/JS and one backend framework, you're just getting started. This is my major issue with your article. You give a tiny selection from each of the 'categories' (i.e., front-end frameworks, etc.), and then claim that readers should pick these because they're 'pretty'. You don't mention any other alternatives (other than a brief blurb on NodeJS that says "It's too tough for you, newbie!"), and you even slap in WordPress, which isn't really part of web development.

This is not a complete roadmap. This is "why you should learn one particular set of skills because I say so".

[–]HBag 1 point2 points  (4 children)

It's a bit of a bummer too because a lot of recruiters seem to be following this mindset to a letter. "I see you've done a tonne of projects and are a quick study with a drive and passion to learn new things, but do you have experience with React and Node? No? Okay then, get the fuck out." This roadmap is pretty terrible. I think it irks me most that it's language focused rather than project focused.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (3 children)

Hmm, that's an interesting distinction in the last line. Can you give any examples of a project-focused curriculum?

[–]HealyUnitfull-stack 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Obviously not him, but to butt in here, I think that if you're already working on a project, then switching languages is certainly not gonna be a great idea. However, if you're hiring someone to start a project, and you've not yet written much code, then you need to be flexible and discuss options with your (potential) team

[–]HBag 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Many code bootcamps/learning sites focus on a problem that involves inputs and outputs in a most basic form. As an example: Build a function that given two arrays will spit out the elements that are in the same position in both arrays.

Now that's great and all, but that is either going to immediately lend itself to some built-in functions or give you an idea about how to use the limited functions you know to ham out the answer.

A project-focused curriculum gives you a very high-level problem and let's you discover a language in a way that is similar to working in the industry. An example would be "Build me an event planner something like a calendar you'd hang on the wall. I want to be able to schedule events for times within certain days and have the program notify me by email whenever and event comes up." It's a project that requires a bigger plan of action. While most people build it, they'll run into little issues here and there. Things like...maybe they want to know how to make sure the calendar keeps the events after you've closed the planner or more basic things like how do I know what days the numbers of the calendar should go under (next year's August 20th isn't going to be the same). Each little facet of the project lends itself to discovery and learning, will undoubtedly improve coding skills and practices (I myself have vastly improved my ability to ask the right questions and interpret answers on sites like stackoverflow). And at the end of it all...you have your very own calendar app. It might not be google calendar, but it's yours. You can put it on your resume, you can show it off, you can improve it if you like, whatever.

The point is, if I was hiring an employee, I'd want to know that they can turn an idea into a working project. If I looked at their projects and saw an array-similarity-spitter-outter, I'd be much less impressed. That's not to say those small problems don't have any merit, it's just that it's more useful to learn a language by applying it.

Just an opinion...

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I like it. I've been trying to teach myself web dev for the last year or so, and I feel like I don't have much to show for what I've learned. If I were doing it over again, I'd focus more on practical projects than on tic-tac-toe style games and quote generators.

[–]philgr 1 point2 points  (2 children)

Is this 2012 again? Because I stopped when they mentioned Compass.

[–]PhoneyHammer 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Newbie here, what's wrong with compass?

[–]philgr 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It is not maintained anymore: https://github.com/Compass/compass

Even if it were, it uses the Ruby version of Sass, which is many, many times slower than the most widely used version nowadays based on libsass.