So, you want to learn JavaScript? Me too. A friend and myself have decided to challenge ourselves to see how much JS we can learn in 90 days, and we want you to learn with us. The goal is to have a solid foundation of the language in order to continue on as web developers building web applications. We also hope to instill other skills needed to succeed in this field such as being self-driven, motivated, perseverance, and continued education. We will focus on best practices and team work, and encourage open source. We will start at a fairly basic level and see where things end up, but I would not call this a beginner course. It will be expected that you are familiar with programming basics, how the web works, and probably seen and interacted with JS before. We are also not here to learn a bunch of libraries, jQuery, or node, though we will touch on those things. The point here is to learn JavaScript well, which will allow you the ability to better understand and work with other peoples code, and even build your own libraries. We want to understand what’s going on, not just blindly load in a library of magic. If you’re ready to accept this challenge with us, read on. If not, we’ll be here when you come back.
90 days starts now…GO! So, why JavaScript? There are lots of reasons to choose JS, and lots of other options to get the job done, and the internet will tell you everybody’s most humble opinion. We are learning JS because that’s the language of the internet, and we want to build things that run on the internet. More so it is simple to get started with. We do not need to worry about fancy runtime or compiler stuff, installation, or version management. Everything is right there in our browser ready to go. Actually, it’s the only language that runs in the browser. We can use JS on the front-end to make our site look beautiful and do elegant visuals, and on the back-end we can build super fast web servers to serve up our beautiful site to our users. We can even interact with our database in JS, making us full-stack engineers knowing only one language. If all this wasn’t enough, the demand for jobs is quickly growing, which is great knowing that all our hard work and effort should pay off.
To begin we will need a place to type and run our code. The easiest way to do that is to use the developer tools console in your browser (Chrome, Firefox, IE, Sarari, etc.). We will be using Chrome. Here is a brilliant article discussing how to master the dev tools console. In Chrome you can access the dev tools with View > Developer > Developer Tools, or on a Mac the keyboard shortcut is (Command + Option + i). Once in the developer tools we want to be in the ‘Console’ tab. Here we will write our first line of code.
Type the following and hit enter:
console.log(“Let’s learn the JavaScript!”)
Congratulations, you’re now a developer, or at least on a great path to become one! We’ll see you tomorrow for JS basics.
Let’s do this thing!
Cheers