Vanilla JS Day 0
After posting about javascript courses in RWD 381 I’ve taken steps towards finally learning the language.
Rather than just doing a single course though I’m spreading my learning across a couple of different areas. This has the downside of me needing to find a lot more time to complete all the different courses, but has the advantage of learning very similar things taught by several people.
Sometimes a particular teacher can keep you focussed on the course throughout, and other times they dip in and out depending on how passionate they are at that particular part of the course.
As humans (*citation needed), we also go through highs and lows, and sometimes even David Attenborough can get a bit boring. By moving between teachers I find that it keeps me a little more interested.
So, the courses that I’ve chosen are
- Javascript Foundations — Aquent Gymnasium (free)
- ES6 for Everyone — Wes Bos ES6 (paid)
VanillaJS Academy — Go Make Things (paid)
How I’m tackling these Vanilla JS courses
At the moment I have the Wes Bos course fully downloaded onto the laptop and queued up in VLC player. Wes produces short videos, around 3-5 minutes in length, which focus on a single thing about ES6. For me, it would be impossible to apply his lessons to my actual work because it gives you the facts about ES6 in a really informative and interesting way, but not the “this is where you would apply this” kind of approach.
The great thing about it is that it’s fun to watch, and the information is actually sinking in so I can parrot it back to someone who is actually working on JS or join in on an existing conversation. It also means that when I see something in the other courses I can question why it’s done that way and not in the way that I saw on Wes’ ES6 course.
The other two courses, VanillaJS Academy (GoMakeThings.com) and Vanilla JS 101 (Aquent Gymnasium) I’m tackling day by day. The Academy course has daily tasks which you should try and complete, as well as a slack channel where you can share your work and have it reviewed by other students.
There’s something nice about learning together with a group of people. It keeps it interesting, you have the ability to see how others are going as you work through the same work, and everyone is talking about the problems they ran into which are a great source of “Thank goodness, someone else made the same mistake I did”.
I’m looking forward to this series and I hope
Day 1 Challenge – VanillaJS Academy
This is what I had to do for day 1/2 of the VanillaJS Academy, code up a checkbox that will reveal/hide the password in the password field.
See the Pen VanillaJS Day 2 by Justin Avery (@justincavery) on CodePen.
