Javascript - the biggest discovery of 2019

As I mentioned earlier ,  I had the occasion this year to learn Javascript. And later a little bit of Typescript together with Angular.

This was a major breakthrough for me, because I did not know almost any of it before!

The steps of learning were the following:
1. learn syntax, basic structures
2. array, string, date functions, IIFE, arrow functions, callbacks
3. classes and objects
4. promises and Fetch function, a little bit of async/await
5. learn node.js, with express and mySql database.

Finally, I was able to build small APIs to Insert, Update, Delete etc data from a MySQL database.
This took aproximately 3 months to master, with weekly 8-10 hours as average. I kept a constant pace, solving a lot of small exercises in the beginning. As I mentioned, this was part of a code-camp called Smartware Academy, organized by a local company.

Some of the resourced I used:

• https://javascript.info/
• https://www.codewars.com/ for coding challenges
• https://www.w3schools.com/Js/
• https://www.codecademy.com/catalog/language/javascript
• https://www.w3schools.com/nodejs/nodejs_mongodb.asp
• https://fireship.io/courses/javascript/

Then, behavior of DOM -> very useful https://www.w3schools.com/js/js_htmldom.asp

The easy part was:
- similarity to known languages (C#)
- a lot of resources and tutorials online
- some good support from the mentors in the course

The hard part was:
- constantly using console.log to show the values of variables during execution/debugging
- DOM - new concepts and behaviour
- callback functions - really strange - and callback hell

Finally, lately I got into a little bit of Jquery/w bootstrap. Really useful, this is still ongoing for me as I want to integrate this into my Razor Pages application.

And now about Angular -  I did quite a few tutorials (maybe 30-40 in total), as I described in my blog post. And yes, I would like to deepen my Typescript experience, since this is one of the coolest trends in the Web stack. I mean, really useful, especially if you come from the C#/Java world, some concepts are borrowed to make your life easier in Javascript.

PS: Does anybody have good ideas about learning Jquery with bootstrap?

Angular? This is real tutorial hell. (but it's worth it)

During the summer of last year, one of my friends I used to go swimming together, mentioned he recommends Angular to me if I want to learn programming seriously.

What an idea...

In February 2019 I started to study Angular and do lots of tutorials. Besides my course and big project which was finalized in summer of 2019, I studied this Javascript framework.

Imagine, I started doing Angular tutorials, and parallelly learned Javascript (ECMA 2015).
My main source of angular tutorials:
- https://angular.io/tutorial
- lots of smaller, simple tutorials : https://javabrains.io/courses/angular_basics/
- later on angular+firestore: https://fireship.io/
- some angular + material tutorials

It took me about 6 months, with weekly 1-2 tutorials, some of which have been quite superficial, copy paste etc. That's tutorial hell! I think now I am the best at faking angular tutorials... I became MEAN in the meanwhile, going through this hell.

Imagine my frustration in the beginning trying to use Web-API for back-end... from .net core and node.js... but that's a different story, maybe for another blog post.

But, around June 2019, I succeeded with some nice applications, one of which I can show below:

https://songlist-varad.firebaseapp.com/

To be honest, it is a replica of an existing tutorial, tailored to my needs:
https://angular-templates.io/tutorials/about/angular-crud-with-firebase

In spite of all odds, this Angular hell has some value. It was hard, steep learning curve. But now I know I don't have to be stopped by new technologies or complex code. Everything has to be taken slowly, maybe only 20 min of focused learning per day. Excellent source was : fireship.io.

This HELL - is worth it!!