I'd recommend doing an online course where you learn something useful like React and the ES6 syntax will come for free as you go along. I found Udemy to be quite useful.
Otherwise, from a programmer's perspective, JS is like nothing else I've seen and it's not something you want to be using without an abstraction over it, i.e. some framework that makes life less miserable when building something more complex than a form.
I feel like being a 'JS professional', unlike other languages, mostly involves in-depth knowledge of the right tools and not the language itself. Unless, you are interested in building frameworks yourself, which I personally find no need to ever do given the available options.
This advice is so strange. Do you imply, that learning pure JS is not useful?
I dread this attitude. Also, you cannot have "in depth" knowledge of any higher end abstraction whithout knowing the language. By definition it will always be just a superficial knowledge.
Pure JS obviously has its uses but I am assuming every professional values productivity which one can't often obtain just by knowing JS itself. JS sometimes feels like assembly, you just don't want to touch it, that's why things like TypeScript exist, for example.
Also, saying an abstraction is useless without knowing the language is similar to saying you can't drive a car without knowing how the timing belt or crankshaft works - most people do fine without either. I'm not dismissing the value of JS fluency, just suggesting that it might be unnecessary and a more practical approach can be taken.
I don't even get it. You write Javascript basically 1:1 the same as Python or Ruby. And I would argue it's even nicer in various cases, from destructuring to lambdas to async/await and first-class Promises.
I wonder if the people say they avoid JS at all costs because it's "like assembly" have been doing that so effectively since 2003 that they never even tried modern JS
I read a blog of a fresh grad describing ‘this’ keyword in JS. The conclusion he/she had by the end of the article was ‘don’t use “this” keyword unless you are JS expert’.
I always see a pattern with these things. Usually if you don’t learn the language well enough, you probably are also not spending enough time learning the frameworks well enough, and you probably are not learning the DOM/Browser well enough, and you probably have not learned CSS well enough. You will have no choice but to hide behind the frameworks.
The people that just learn React or the latest ES6 think they know good enough JS, but when I see their code I see clear patterns of poor abstractions, separation of concerns, the kind of code that makes you want to take a shower after touching it.
React is a particularly bad way to learn pragmatic Javascript because it's idioms are quite different from how people program in any other scenario but UI dev. It's a UI library and you won't learn much about Javascript programming from it. You will just know React.
You should absolutely learn React if you want to be employed writing with JS, but people should understand where React lies in the context of javascript. It isn't an abstraction of JS, it's a UI library written in JS.
> You should absolutely learn React if you want to be employed writing with JS
I know that this probably isn't how you meant it, but I think what you said is a bit misleading to someone who wants to learn JS for a job.
Having skills in React are an almost guaranteed way to get a job writing JS. It's definitely not the only viable way to get employed writing JS. Contrary to popular belief, there are many jobs out there asking for Node.js skills but not necessarily React or any heavy frontend knowledge. You can also make a living doing Vue or Angular, and Svelte is an up and coming framework that will be good to learn and I believe will create lots of jobs. I've been writing mostly Ember.js code for years now, yet I'm employed.
I just want to make sure that learners don't think that it's all React or nothing. Nothing against React, by any means. If someone learns React but it doesn't interest them, their career in JS isn't over.
A little learning is a dangerous thing ; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring : There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, And drinking largely sobers us again.
If you change the section border-style to dotted and overall font-family to sans-serif your website basically becomes https://www.bloomberg.com :)
Also for large device widths margins of something like 20% makes it more readable. Visit somethings like https://www.nytimes.com and compare how much narrower the content is.
I was pondering about the idea of a browser extension for a sort of local DNS. Paying for domains could be ditched if everyone had a local copy of a database that mapped any character sequence (even emojis) to a server address that would get filled in by the extension in the url bar. Not sure if it would extend to mobile or all websites, but could work similar to a social network in the sense that you need to get the extension (i.e. access) first, and then you can find someone just by using a string that they've provided. Combined with something like Github pages it would offer a full free solution.
Thanks for ZeroTier! Managed to convert a few friends from using Hamachi for LAN games, which was always a pain to setup previously. It simply just works for my needs.
ooh! so it could replace Hamachi. I think this is one use case (without using the product name) that can be listed in a uses-cases page. Hope other Zerotier users would chime in with more use cases.
ZeroTier emulates a L2 Ethernet switch over any network, so anything you can do with Ethernet basically.
You make networks, add stuff to them, and any protocol you want just works: games, ssh, sftp, http, drive mounts (though they can be slow over the Internet), video chat, VoIP, even stuff like BGP or old protocols like IPX work.
Otherwise, from a programmer's perspective, JS is like nothing else I've seen and it's not something you want to be using without an abstraction over it, i.e. some framework that makes life less miserable when building something more complex than a form.
I feel like being a 'JS professional', unlike other languages, mostly involves in-depth knowledge of the right tools and not the language itself. Unless, you are interested in building frameworks yourself, which I personally find no need to ever do given the available options.