An example from personal experience: When I was really young, I wanted to figure out web programming. I knew C#, so when I came across a book on making website

An example from personal experience: When I was really young, I wanted to figure out web programming. I knew C#, so when I came across a book on making websites in C# with ASP.NET, it was a no-brainer. I the slogged through 2000+ pages on how to handle connection state, WYSIWYG web forms generation with drag and drop component, etc. The experience was horrible, and turned me off to web programming. A brief aside, for those unfamiliar: ASP.NET presents the programmer with a (leaky) abstraction over HTTP and HTML, pretending that the protocols involved are stateful, whereas the reality is that HTTP is stateless. This creates all sorts of new ASP.NET specific problems, which are then addressed by jumping through hoops to ensure control state is (de)serialized just right, etc. Thus the 2000+ page count. Later on I discovered ASP.NET MVC, which did away the the “let’s pretend HTTP is stateful”, and takes an approach much like just about any other web framework out there. You’re expected to know HTML, CSS and HTTP. I was like “oh, is this it? I just learn some HTML, register some request handlers, and generate some HTML?”. Until then, my focus was on getting something working, and I trusted that what they covered would get me up and running. That line of reasoning failed me with ASP.NET, as the book set me up to ignore the underlying (and ironically, much simpler) machinery of the web. I’m positive ASP.NET isn’t the only framework guilty of distracting developers from learning the fundamentals. And think about it: when’s the last time you’ve seen HTTP or HTML listed as required proficiencies in a job description? I can’t remember. What I do see is an expectation to know all the intricacies of React, Babel, Grunt, Redux, whatever. If you’re trying to land your first job, or working on climbing the ladder, it’s easy to fall into the trap of investing all your time in finding your way around the accidental complexity of the frameworks you intend to make your living from using, and underestimate the value of understanding what’s going on in the layers beneath the abstractions.