Ask HN: Where to start with getting back into front end? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Where to start with getting back into front end?

#11

Post by joshxyz » Wed, Jun 30, 2021, 10:44 AM UTC

cosmodisk wrote: post #6

bwh2 wrote: post #4

I was in a similar position and the book Rediscovering JavaScript helped me understand syntax and structural changes, which made learning about new frameworks and tools easier.

Had a quick look at it. It skims/oversimplifies some important aspects that are famous in JS community to cause all sorts of issues down the line. Maybe you don't know JS would be better?

Would recommend mdn javascript docs any day. Every once in a while i forget something, i just google "mdn array sort" or some variant of it for my problem, and the answers there are clear

Re: Ask HN: Where to start with getting back into front end?

#12

Post by joshxyz » Wed, Jun 30, 2021, 10:46 AM UTC

schwartzworld wrote: post #8

The basics are the same as they've been for a long time. You can easily build a working front end app using html/css/js in a single file. Build a few projects so you can familiarize yourself with modern apis without the burden of tooling. Once you've built a few small projects, hopefully you'll have a sense of the pain points modern frameworks fix. Most people use global variables for state or even store their state…

Our team uses hooks only, as we found classes distasteful. Most projects can be built without redux, too. React + tailwind goes a long way, lol, but yea redux has its own use case if and only if you need it

Re: Ask HN: Where to start with getting back into front end?

#13

Post by schwartzworld » Wed, Jun 30, 2021, 11:25 AM UTC

joshxyz wrote: post #12

schwartzworld wrote: post #8

The basics are the same as they've been for a long time. You can easily build a working front end app using html/css/js in a single file. Build a few projects so you can familiarize yourself with modern apis without the burden of tooling. Once you've built a few small projects, hopefully you'll have a sense of the pain points modern frameworks fix. Most people use global variables for state or even store their state…

Our team uses hooks only, as we found classes distasteful. Most projects can be built without redux, too. React + tailwind goes a long way, lol, but yea redux has its own use case if and only if you need it

I don't think hardly anyone uses classes anymore, but classes vs hooks are implementation details. The important thing is the react compositional model, and it's easiest to learn that without any other tooling.

I'm sure redux has a few use cases, but the primary use case I've seen is "I've coded myself into a corner and I don't want to refactor anything."

Re: Ask HN: Where to start with getting back into front end?

#14

Post by uncomputation » Wed, Jun 30, 2021, 3:10 PM UTC

IMO React kind of epitomizes modern front-end/Node full-stack development (for better or worse) so I think if you want just one thing to focus on, focus on React. Once you get past the stage of basic React stuff, you will naturally run into all of these other tangential topics (Babel, SSR, isomorphic fetch, Svelte, Webpack, general JS craziness if that’s what you’re looking for)

Re: Ask HN: Where to start with getting back into front end?

#15

Post by ken_downs » Wed, Jun 30, 2021, 7:03 PM UTC

The wars are over, the component abstraction won. Angular, React, VueJS and Svelte all begin squarely with the UI component. They only differ in their syntax and structure for wrapping up CSS, HTML, and JS/TS into a unit.

Also this is just my own observation, your mileage may vary, but when back end teams are tasked with upgrading front end tech they pick Angular, and when experienced front end guys are given a project for a tech refresh/rewrite they go with React.

Most build tool arguments IMHO are weeds. Core is having a goal - something you need to get working on a deadline. That tends to be a great weedkiller.