Being a software developer is one of the highest paying jobs in the world. Therefore, you may want to become a software developer. JavaScript is one of the most popular and versatile programming languages in the world, so it makes sense to learn that first.
In this article, we’ll look at how you can become a successful JavaScript developer.
Learning How to Solve Problems
Software development is all about solving problems. So we have to get good at that.
JavaScript language, frameworks, and libraries are just ways to solve problems. We’re just using JavaScript to solve our problems if we’re a JavaScript developer.
Therefore, we should learn how to solve problems before we learn JavaScript. Learn some basic algorithms and data structures like lists and arrays. Also, brush up on basic math so that we can use them later.
Geeks for Geeks is a good site to look at learning algorithms and data structure as there’re many problems on those topics, from beginner to advanced levels.
Just look at the general principles for now until you learn some programming languages.
Learn JavaScript Basics
After learning how to solve problems, it’s time to learn how to solve them with JavaScript.
To do that, we can read books, take courses, or watch videos from YouTube. There’re courses of sites like edX and Coursera that are free if we’re just auditing them.
Therefore, they’re probably worth a try to see if it’s a bit. There’re also courses offline of course in schools.
The most important thing is that plenty of practice is required. Whatever you do, you have to practice solving problems you found in books and online
The basics include JavaScript variables and functions. Once you learn that, then learn about objects, classes, and methods.
These are all for storing data. You also need to learn about JavaScript operators so you can do something with the data in variables and objects.
Then learn about arrays and loops which lets us store data in a list.
Also, you need to learn about strings to know how to store text data.
Be sure to learn the latest JavaScript syntax since they’re better than the old syntax in most cases. They include things like spread operator, destructuring, let and const and more.
Learn the JavaScript Standard Library
After learning the basics, you should learn about things that help make our lives easier.
There’re lots of methods in the standard library that helps us like array and string manipulation methods.
Also, handling dates is also important. JavaScript has a built-in Date constructor to help us do that.
Learn About HTML, CSS, and DOM Manipulation
HTML and CSS let us put items on a web page and style them respectively. Therefore, it’s important to learn that if you’re going to become a JavaScript developer.
Once you know that, then you can learn how to manipulate HTML and CSS with JavaScript.
The browser parses HTML and CSS into by putting everything in a document object model (DOM) tree, which is a tree of all the parent and child elements.
This is important for front end development since DOM manipulation is the most basic operation of front end development. To learn DOM manipulation, you’ve to learn how to add and remove objects from the DOM tree.
Also, you’ve to learn how to style things dynamically with JavaScript.
If you’re proficient at this, then learning front end frameworks would be a breeze.
Node.js
Node.js is a runtime environment for running Node.js code on the server. It’s used for back end development and anything else other than web front end development.
Therefore, it’s also important to learn about Node.js. For back end development, Express is a simple web framework that’s popular. It’s simple enough that simple apps can be built without much effort.
To build a server-side app, it’s also important to know things like how to manipulate files on the server with the standard fs module, and how to save stuff to a database.
Conclusion
Becoming a JavaScript developer can be done for free as long as you have the aptitude and drive to learn all the basic knowledge. Also, plenty of practice is required to get good at JavaScript development so that’s also important.
