I guess you are a web developer. Hopefully you are doing fine and you have a great job, maybe you are even self-employed or working as a freelancer. Maybe you are just starting out as a web developer, maybe you have been working as a programmer for a longer period already. However comfortable you are with JavaScript, it is always good to get a refresher on some topics to read up about or get them on the radar in the first place. Here are 10 things you definitely have to learn before you can call yourself a master in JavaScript. Keep reading and start learning...
1. About
JavaScript is not a very complicated language at its core. It can seem difficult to learn because of all of the noise around it. Browser APIs, Library APIs, jQuery, React, TypeScript, the many npm packages out there, etc all can make the language syntax space seem huge.
And this isn’t helped by the fact that the language has evolved over time so you’ll see many different ways to do a single task spread out over the internet. But the core language and standard libraries are actually pretty small compared to languages like Python and Java that have more features and larger standard libraries.
Eventually you’ll need the ecosystem. But knowing the core language features that are implemented in most browsers is a great start. If you’re starting from a weak base here I’d recommend finding a good book on the core language like Eloquent JavaScript2 and digging in.
2. Developing tools
When developing JavaScript, its important to be able to debug problems and understand how existing systems work. JavaScript has a fantastic ecosystem of developer tools for diagnosing bugs and examining application code. For the most part they’re bundled with browsers. Learning how to use these tools well will turbocharge your JS developing skills. If you can’t use them though, it will make everything much harder.
Competence in this means comfort with at least the JavaScript debugger panel of a browser’s dev tools. You should be able to set and use breakpoints, use watch mode and the console to test for the value of expressions, and understand the stack traces. But its also good to get comfortable using the elements panel to understand and manipulate the DOM, and the network panel to debug network requests.
Functions are the core of the JavaScript language. You should be able to use them fluently. That means understanding function scope, closures, how this works, and the difference between normal functions and arrow functions. It also means knowing about how to process arrays with function using methods like map, filter, and reduce.
3. Basic design tasks
No matter how well you learn JavaScript, you’ll be limited career-wise if you can’t manage basic design tasks. This might not seem inherently true; after all isn’t that what professional designers are for? But the truth is that unless you’re a purely server-side developer, there will be times when you’re asked to fill in a visual gap that a designer doesn’t have time for, or there will be ambiguities in a designers spec that aren’t worth a meeting. And learning the basics of design will help you communicate better with designers and product managers about technical constraints and design requirements.
When I talk design, I mean both the basics of implementing a visual design with HTML and CSS3, and enough of an understanding of design basics to create a simple UI that looks okay and isn’t confusing. That last requirement is harder than you’d think. Design is hard and mostly orthogonal to the set of skills most folks pick up while learning to code.
4. Node.js based tooling
One of the biggest shifts in the last 5 years in the JavaScript world has been the explosive growth and consolidation of tools to help build JavaScript applications. Tools like eslint, Babel, Typescript, and Webpack are essential to many teams workflows. While you don’t necessarily have to be experienced writing applications for Node.js, it is important that you be able to use those tools. That means knowing how to install Node and use npm to install and update packages. It also means getting comfortable with build tools like Webpack, Rollup or Ember CLI and knowing how to use them. Reasonable people can differ on how many tools and libraries you should be using, or what the right ones to use are, but having a basic familiarity with how the Node ecosystem works has become essential.
5. Program performance
Like design, performance is a deep well of things you can learn. But knowing the basics is important and can go a long ways. For performance “the basics” is more about process than knowledge. You need to learn how to debug slow processes and understand where the problems are coming from. For browser environments in particular there are some baseline things to understand. You’ll want to be able to tell the difference between code that is running slowly due to parsing slowness, run time slowness, and network latency. It’s important to learn how to keep a UI responsive and not block rendering with other calculations. And it’s great to understand how to cache data and avoid making too many requests to the server.
This is also an area where learning more about Computer Science theory can be beneficial. Studying data structures and algorithms can help give you good intuitions on how to handle data, and learning about Big O notation gives you a language for discussing performance trade offs. This is the type of background knowledge that pays off in occasional subtle ways though, not something that is always obvious applicable in the moment.
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