TLDR: there’s a lot to learn in the JavaScript ecosystem, and ten days is not nearly enough. As Norvig said, it’s more about teaching yourself to program in ten years.

I recently set out to learn as much JavaScript as possible in ten days. I’ve filtered the individual days’ posts from the blog home, but they’re all linked below.

Day 1 Day2 Day 3 Day 4 Day 5
Day 6 Day 7 Day 8 Day 9 Day 10

Overview

At the end of ten days, I feel like I know less JavaScript than I expected. This might be because I have a bit more appreciation for: (a) the extent of new language features and the speed of change; and (b) the scale of the ecosystem.

The meandering path that I ended up taking in ten days is maybe indicative of the nature of JavaScript today. It included:

  • reading a classic book where a good amount of material was no longer applicable
  • struggling with version compatibitliy of new language features
  • working out instance vs prorotype issues in the TypeScript compiler
  • using a mature framework like React to build a toy app (and getting stuck on CSS)

I guess those are all part of “learning JavaScript”, because JavaScript today is comprised of so many different aspects. So really, it makes sense to have more specific learning goal.

As with studies in general, though, it’s often hard to know upfront what to study, or what yields the greatest personal interest and utility. So some amount of sumbling around is usually unavoidable, if not always helpful. Though there was a fair amount of hair-pulling, I’m glad I did the past ten days, and the blog posts helped keep me on track with some personal accountability.

Key Materials Covered

The main materials covered were as follows, excluding miscellaneous articles and documentation.

Books

Videos

Tutorials / References

Thoughts on Materials

My perspective remains quite limited, but…

  • I’d recommend unequivocally the MDN tutorail on React, as well as the other materials in their Learn Web Development series.

  • The TypeScript handbook is quite good as far as official documentation goes, though it’s probably worth finding longer material dedicated to learning TypeScript.

  • As far as books, I’d look for the latest recommendations, given how fast the language is evolving. I’d probably not recommend the Crockford, given that it’s become relatively dated. For more advanced programmers, the Atencio is interesting and will likely remain relevant for a while.

Wrapping Up

I suspect the impact of the ten days on futures studies is:

  • I’ll do at least some more basic tutorials on Vue, CSS, etc
  • it will be much less daunting to figure out, say, working with JavaScript ports in Elm

I’d also like to find a really good book on TypeScript, for which perhaps the Recurse Center community has a good recommendation.

Future Todos