How to Become a Great JavaScript Developer

Learn Dart :)

This is a good collection of resources that I have found are very educational and useful. That said, for me personally it was extremely important to dig into some problems concretely rather than by reading. "OK I've read about how I should do this in the ideal - now go actually set up an Angular app with a full test suite pointing at a REST API." Or perhaps - "I've got a great idea for some code art - let's try it out."

Without the follow-through I found that I could keep up in a conversation but still had doubts and issues when it came to implementation. Doing it in anger, delivering a product, as many times as possible helps a good deal in moving toward greatness.

tldr: ( my own, not the authors in the article itself )

- Read books

- Learn libraries ( author seems to like node.js and recommends libraries associated with that )

- Do exercises

- Learn how classes work in JS ( Note this is amusing to me since JS does not have classes in the typical sense [ they are implemented via libraries with prototypes and closures ] )

- Learn what Es5, Es6, ES7 are ( There are good things here, but be aware that most of these features are not implemented in most browsers and will requires shims and/or translators to even function. Be careful as they may work in your browser but not others. Test! )

- Read JS blogs and watch JS educational videos

- Practice

It's an okay article. If you are clueless how to start learning seriously this should help. Some decent books and websites are mentioned by name.

I think the "every JS developer needs to learn XYZ" is a bit off though. This is one man's perspective.

The best thing that happened to me as a JavaScript developer was being exposed to other languages. Especially the not-so-fancy Java and C++, really opened my mind about structuring code and planning for a long-term project.

Knowing JavaScript and JavaScript frameworks is surprisingly useless for the type of work JS devs usually handle. The documentation often consists of TodoMVC type of examples and approaches. Hardly anyone explains how patterns like DDD, SOLID, advanced REST, etc. fit into this. The highly appraised Flux is in reality just a pub/sub system like many on backend (and still it's a huge step forward - it admits JS systems are large and complex).

I'm just looking at a system design graph, preparing for a new job. There are about 30 nodes representing multiple services, databases, load balancers and processes on the backend. There are two for frontend - one says "JS" and the other "JSON". This is how most people think about frontend and to be a great JavaScript developer just don't be one of them.

... I'll never, for the life of me, understand comparing a high-level scripting language to almost the lowest of low-level assembly languages, as if JS doesn't give you abstractions at all.

If you can't write good code in JS, it's because you're a bad programmer.