42 ms·

Ask HN: JavaScript developer – what do I need to know?

46 points by peterchon 12y ago

I feel like I have a pretty firm grasp on OOJS and am proficient at solving any JS problem without using a library. What should I be concentrating on now to be "Javascript developer"?

mobinni 12y ago
If you're focusing on OOJS then you should be focusing on learning other programming patterns in JS, because it isn't meant to be used in an OO context. Look into stuff like functional programming, reactive programming, contextual programming. Learn the patterns and learn to apply them in your projects
- peterchon 12y ago
  I guess that was the problem I faced when I started down the OOJS - what do I exactly use this for? I understand that it's a great way for reuse & extending, but aside from giant applications with numerous developers, is it really useful?
  - mobinni 12y ago
    Well with any program language you can solve a multitude of problems I guess what you need to do is start by learning the concepts from the basics http://eloquentjavascript.net/1st_edition/chapter6.html http://eloquentjavascript.net/1st_edition/chapter6.html Also maybe look at larger libraries like underscore, lodash and get acquainted with the programming concepts they apply since they are well maintained libraries. I read you are familiar with AngularJS, get into the source code, understand how the beast works. Get your hands dirty, maybe build something into the angular library itself just to test it out.
- awinder 12y ago
  This comment is really one of my pet peeves. Javascript is absolutely meant to be "used in an OO context" -- everything including functions have been designed as objects since very early on in the language. It does not implement classical inheritance, sure, but classical inheritance isn't a mandatory design pattern for a language to be considered OO. Functional programming & reactive programming are absolutely valuable, though, and fulfill very real design patterns in Javascript. They're great skills to learn. No one reading this comment should come away thinking that OO is not absolutely important to JS, and that if you try to solve every problem in JS without utilizing it's aspects, you're probably hamstringing yourself without need.
haidrali 12y ago
I think you need to get hands on Front end JavaScript frameworks like AngularJS. Also you should be comfortable with widely used JS libraries and plugins (bootstrap, J query etc)
- peterchon 12y ago
  I have a pretty solid understanding of AngularJS, and I can't really think of any project that really <i>requires</i> jQuery.
  - hashberry 12y ago
    Yet many projects do use jQuery, so if you're in an interview you should be able to say you've built a jQuery plug-in.
M8 12y ago
http://wtfjs.com http://wtfjs.com
- peterchon 12y ago
  interesting find. It's a wonder that JS is moving into everything.
  - Zelphyr 12y ago
    Every language has its idiosyncrasies, annoyances, and wtf's. Because they're written by humans who have idiosyncrasies, annoyances, and wtf's. JS is moving into everything because it's easy to learn, reasonably expressive, and is accessible. It may not be the best but often as not its the "good enough" that seems to rise to the top. In other words; you're better off accepting it for what it is and doing the best you can with it.
    - Retra 12y ago
      Better off compared to what?
      - Zelphyr 12y ago
        Fighting it, complaining, being miserable. None of which will get you anywhere really. If you hate JS that much it probably makes sense to focus your efforts towards a different kind of development than web.
        Retra 12y ago
        "If you don't like something, just forget about it and do something else." I can't wait to teach that to my kids.
    - M8 12y ago
      No. It's moving into everything because it's well established in browsers. Otherwise nobody would use it.
marijn 12y ago
See if http://eloquentjavascript.net http://eloquentjavascript.net works for you. It doesn't focus on OO, but that's okay, because trying to model everything as OO in JS is going to be painful.
- peterchon 12y ago
  yes. yes it does.
- verbin217 12y ago
  The first few chapters of this book are, to the extant that I'm aware, the best introduction to the concepts of programming in existence. Also, the online version of the book features an inline code-highlighting text editor from the same author as the book. You can use it to edit and evaluate the examples. It's actually the same editor used in the Chrome developer tools.
michaelchisari 12y ago
• Patterns (FRP, RP, etc) • Ecmascript 6 • Frameworks (React, Ember, Angular are the big three) Beyond that, it's important to understand the pain points that people are trying to solve. For instance, why is React a better approach to front-end UI's than MVC? Is JSX a reasonable approach to the DOM, and is it worth breaking conventional wisdom? What problem does Facebook's css-layout solve? What issues with modularity and reusability are people trying to solve, and how is this different at different scales of complexity? What's the "why" behind the changes to ES6? And even beyond that, look at the future, and see what people are trying to solve that nobody has quite solved yet. In other words, don't just understand what you can do with Javascript, understand what hurts and how people are trying to fix it, or at least make it hurt less.
- peterchon 12y ago
  It's really weird to me trying to do a lot of data handling on the front-end side rather than using server-side.
  - Bahamut 12y ago
    I spoke to one acquaintance about this after he told me that for his team, they are doing the calculations on the frontend mostly - his explanation was that it turned out to be too unperformant to cache precomputed values in a remote database (and even in IndexedDB) and pull them out (his company does a lot of work involving heavy data analytics & visualizations).
    - michaelchisari 12y ago
      Especially considering how fast even the slowest computers of today are, the client-server architecture gives us the option to immediately decentralize calculations across all clients as needed. It's an easy optimization that's hard to give up, but does present it's own challenges.
  - mambodog 12y ago
    You should usually be doing 'data handling' wherever results in the best user experience. Persistence and calculations which are essential to the integrity of your application's data obviously need to be done (or at least validated) on the server, but if the application has any kind of complex workflow then constantly going back to the server to generate new application states is likely to severely bog down that workflow.
ksmithbaylor 12y ago
I have been reading through this awesome book series called You Don't Know JS (youdontknowjs.com), and it's helped me SO MUCH to understand JS at the next level. I had the immense pleasure of taking a workshop with Kyle Simpson, the author, at a conference last year and it covered much of the material from his books. In particular I found the book on 'this' and object prototypes to be fantastic.
- peterchon 12y ago
  I'll have to check that out - thanks!
joshuapants 12y ago
If you haven't already, start compiling a portfolio. Show what you can do, and all the better if you can show that what you've worked on has practical use.
- peterchon 12y ago
  I have, but I'm having hard time creating projects that uses (or rather justify using) the higher-level JS programming paradigm.
  - michaelchisari 12y ago
    Build a social network to compete with Facebook. I kid (I tried to do the same thing), but in reality, the higher level programming paradigms come into play when your software complexity increases to unmanageable levels. Building small projects won't help you understand why they're necessary.
rohitv 12y ago
Closure/ Promises. I am surprised by how many js developers that I personally know are unaware of them.
dccoolgai 12y ago
JS doesn't really become a "thing" until you combine it with the web. Learn the new and recent things that are happening with the web platform - Web Workers, Service Workers (Holy crap this will blow your mind when you learn about it.), WebRTC, etc. I'm going to go directly against the grain of the highest-rated comment here (sorry) and say "DON'T learn any of the frameworks" (Angular, React, whatever one they came out with this week) unless you are completely bored with the web platform / ES6 stuff. Reason: Platform stuff will be here 5 years from now. The framework they are all monkeying with (is it React this week?) most likely won't be. Go ahead and learn one of the frameworks if you want to appear erudite in an interview or something, but otherwise focus on things that will stick. (For suggestions, browse "caniuse.com" and read the crap out of anything JS-related you haven't seen/heard of that at least 2 browsers intend on implementing.) Node. This is the most focused way to become one with "asyncness" in JS. Lodash. is JS zen. Even if you don't use it for everything, try and "think like it" when you are solving problems. For grins and giggles go read some of the "Data Structures and Algorithms in JS" posts or books they have. Do different sorting algorithms. My breakthrough moment in my JS journey was codewars.com . When you see how clever you aren't after understanding other people's much more elegant solutions to problems - only then do you realize what you need to do to get better. True in life - true in JS.
- bshimmin 12y ago
  You're honestly recommending he learn about Service Workers, which are, right now, a working draft with partial support in Chrome and Opera and nothing else? I mean, yes, in a way learning that would give him a taste for what modern development in JavaScript is like, but not really in the nicest sense!
  - dccoolgai 12y ago
    It is live in Chrome 41 right now (with the exception of the cache API, I think, which it can be used without). It is live in Firefox nightly - and they have clearly stated they are bringing it to Evergreen soon. It is in Opera. Even IE has stated "under consideration". (see https://jakearchibald.github.io/isserviceworkerready/ https://jakearchibald.github.io/isserviceworkerready/ ) It's a lot farther along than a lot of folks realize. And IMHO, the impact of it makes it something that even Safari will have to begrudgingly implement soon after Firefox brings it to production. If I thought it was anything less than inevitable, I'd say "wait". But for a JS-dev, I honestly think this right now is the sweetspot between "Hot Shit" and "Will ACtually Still Be Relevant in 5 Years". (Think XHR 6-7 years ago.) So, yeah, I stand by the recommendation.
andyfleming 12y ago
Are you looking to develop server-side projects in javascript, client-side applications, or both?
bvanslyke 12y ago
- Location of a good bar near your workplace. - A taste for strong drinks. - An ignorance of how nice other languages/environments are.
steveax 12y ago
I think Rebecca Murphey's latest "Baseline" post [1] covers this pretty well. Not sure I'd include Node, but ES2015, modules, testing and build tools/automation for sure. You should know your way around the browser dev tools, have a good handle on async and promises and understand the DOM and events. [1]: http://rmurphey.com/blog/2015/03/23/a-baseline-for-front-end-developers-2015/ http://rmurphey.com/blog/2015/03/23/a-baseline-for-front-end...

46 points by peterchon 12y ago

I feel like I have a pretty firm grasp on OOJS and am proficient at solving any JS problem without using a library. What should I be concentrating on now to be "Javascript developer"?

mobinni 12y ago

If you're focusing on OOJS then you should be focusing on learning other programming patterns in JS, because it isn't meant to be used in an OO context. Look into stuff like functional programming, reactive programming, contextual programming. Learn the patterns and learn to apply them in your projects

peterchon 12y ago
I guess that was the problem I faced when I started down the OOJS - what do I exactly use this for? I understand that it's a great way for reuse & extending, but aside from giant applications with numerous developers, is it really useful?
- mobinni 12y ago
  Well with any program language you can solve a multitude of problems I guess what you need to do is start by learning the concepts from the basics http://eloquentjavascript.net/1st_edition/chapter6.html http://eloquentjavascript.net/1st_edition/chapter6.html Also maybe look at larger libraries like underscore, lodash and get acquainted with the programming concepts they apply since they are well maintained libraries. I read you are familiar with AngularJS, get into the source code, understand how the beast works. Get your hands dirty, maybe build something into the angular library itself just to test it out.
awinder 12y ago
This comment is really one of my pet peeves. Javascript is absolutely meant to be "used in an OO context" -- everything including functions have been designed as objects since very early on in the language. It does not implement classical inheritance, sure, but classical inheritance isn't a mandatory design pattern for a language to be considered OO. Functional programming & reactive programming are absolutely valuable, though, and fulfill very real design patterns in Javascript. They're great skills to learn. No one reading this comment should come away thinking that OO is not absolutely important to JS, and that if you try to solve every problem in JS without utilizing it's aspects, you're probably hamstringing yourself without need.

haidrali 12y ago

I think you need to get hands on Front end JavaScript frameworks like AngularJS. Also you should be comfortable with widely used JS libraries and plugins (bootstrap, J query etc)

peterchon 12y ago
I have a pretty solid understanding of AngularJS, and I can't really think of any project that really <i>requires</i> jQuery.
- hashberry 12y ago
  Yet many projects do use jQuery, so if you're in an interview you should be able to say you've built a jQuery plug-in.

M8 12y ago

http://wtfjs.com http://wtfjs.com

peterchon 12y ago
interesting find. It's a wonder that JS is moving into everything.
- Zelphyr 12y ago
  Every language has its idiosyncrasies, annoyances, and wtf's. Because they're written by humans who have idiosyncrasies, annoyances, and wtf's. JS is moving into everything because it's easy to learn, reasonably expressive, and is accessible. It may not be the best but often as not its the "good enough" that seems to rise to the top. In other words; you're better off accepting it for what it is and doing the best you can with it.
  - Retra 12y ago
    Better off compared to what?
    - Zelphyr 12y ago
      Fighting it, complaining, being miserable. None of which will get you anywhere really. If you hate JS that much it probably makes sense to focus your efforts towards a different kind of development than web.
      - Retra 12y ago
        "If you don't like something, just forget about it and do something else." I can't wait to teach that to my kids.
  - M8 12y ago
    No. It's moving into everything because it's well established in browsers. Otherwise nobody would use it.

marijn 12y ago

See if http://eloquentjavascript.net http://eloquentjavascript.net works for you. It doesn't focus on OO, but that's okay, because trying to model everything as OO in JS is going to be painful.

peterchon 12y ago
yes. yes it does.
verbin217 12y ago
The first few chapters of this book are, to the extant that I'm aware, the best introduction to the concepts of programming in existence. Also, the online version of the book features an inline code-highlighting text editor from the same author as the book. You can use it to edit and evaluate the examples. It's actually the same editor used in the Chrome developer tools.

michaelchisari 12y ago

• Patterns (FRP, RP, etc) • Ecmascript 6 • Frameworks (React, Ember, Angular are the big three) Beyond that, it's important to understand the pain points that people are trying to solve. For instance, why is React a better approach to front-end UI's than MVC? Is JSX a reasonable approach to the DOM, and is it worth breaking conventional wisdom? What problem does Facebook's css-layout solve? What issues with modularity and reusability are people trying to solve, and how is this different at different scales of complexity? What's the "why" behind the changes to ES6? And even beyond that, look at the future, and see what people are trying to solve that nobody has quite solved yet. In other words, don't just understand what you can do with Javascript, understand what hurts and how people are trying to fix it, or at least make it hurt less.

peterchon 12y ago
It's really weird to me trying to do a lot of data handling on the front-end side rather than using server-side.
- Bahamut 12y ago
  I spoke to one acquaintance about this after he told me that for his team, they are doing the calculations on the frontend mostly - his explanation was that it turned out to be too unperformant to cache precomputed values in a remote database (and even in IndexedDB) and pull them out (his company does a lot of work involving heavy data analytics & visualizations).
  - michaelchisari 12y ago
    Especially considering how fast even the slowest computers of today are, the client-server architecture gives us the option to immediately decentralize calculations across all clients as needed. It's an easy optimization that's hard to give up, but does present it's own challenges.
- mambodog 12y ago
  You should usually be doing 'data handling' wherever results in the best user experience. Persistence and calculations which are essential to the integrity of your application's data obviously need to be done (or at least validated) on the server, but if the application has any kind of complex workflow then constantly going back to the server to generate new application states is likely to severely bog down that workflow.

ksmithbaylor 12y ago

I have been reading through this awesome book series called You Don't Know JS (youdontknowjs.com), and it's helped me SO MUCH to understand JS at the next level. I had the immense pleasure of taking a workshop with Kyle Simpson, the author, at a conference last year and it covered much of the material from his books. In particular I found the book on 'this' and object prototypes to be fantastic.

peterchon 12y ago
I'll have to check that out - thanks!

joshuapants 12y ago

If you haven't already, start compiling a portfolio. Show what you can do, and all the better if you can show that what you've worked on has practical use.

peterchon 12y ago
I have, but I'm having hard time creating projects that uses (or rather justify using) the higher-level JS programming paradigm.
- michaelchisari 12y ago
  Build a social network to compete with Facebook. I kid (I tried to do the same thing), but in reality, the higher level programming paradigms come into play when your software complexity increases to unmanageable levels. Building small projects won't help you understand why they're necessary.

rohitv 12y ago

Closure/ Promises. I am surprised by how many js developers that I personally know are unaware of them.

dccoolgai 12y ago

JS doesn't really become a "thing" until you combine it with the web. Learn the new and recent things that are happening with the web platform - Web Workers, Service Workers (Holy crap this will blow your mind when you learn about it.), WebRTC, etc. I'm going to go directly against the grain of the highest-rated comment here (sorry) and say "DON'T learn any of the frameworks" (Angular, React, whatever one they came out with this week) unless you are completely bored with the web platform / ES6 stuff. Reason: Platform stuff will be here 5 years from now. The framework they are all monkeying with (is it React this week?) most likely won't be. Go ahead and learn one of the frameworks if you want to appear erudite in an interview or something, but otherwise focus on things that will stick. (For suggestions, browse "caniuse.com" and read the crap out of anything JS-related you haven't seen/heard of that at least 2 browsers intend on implementing.) Node. This is the most focused way to become one with "asyncness" in JS. Lodash. is JS zen. Even if you don't use it for everything, try and "think like it" when you are solving problems. For grins and giggles go read some of the "Data Structures and Algorithms in JS" posts or books they have. Do different sorting algorithms. My breakthrough moment in my JS journey was codewars.com . When you see how clever you aren't after understanding other people's much more elegant solutions to problems - only then do you realize what you need to do to get better. True in life - true in JS.

bshimmin 12y ago
You're honestly recommending he learn about Service Workers, which are, right now, a working draft with partial support in Chrome and Opera and nothing else? I mean, yes, in a way learning that would give him a taste for what modern development in JavaScript is like, but not really in the nicest sense!
- dccoolgai 12y ago
  It is live in Chrome 41 right now (with the exception of the cache API, I think, which it can be used without). It is live in Firefox nightly - and they have clearly stated they are bringing it to Evergreen soon. It is in Opera. Even IE has stated "under consideration". (see https://jakearchibald.github.io/isserviceworkerready/ https://jakearchibald.github.io/isserviceworkerready/ ) It's a lot farther along than a lot of folks realize. And IMHO, the impact of it makes it something that even Safari will have to begrudgingly implement soon after Firefox brings it to production. If I thought it was anything less than inevitable, I'd say "wait". But for a JS-dev, I honestly think this right now is the sweetspot between "Hot Shit" and "Will ACtually Still Be Relevant in 5 Years". (Think XHR 6-7 years ago.) So, yeah, I stand by the recommendation.

andyfleming 12y ago

Are you looking to develop server-side projects in javascript, client-side applications, or both?

bvanslyke 12y ago

- Location of a good bar near your workplace. - A taste for strong drinks. - An ignorance of how nice other languages/environments are.

steveax 12y ago

I think Rebecca Murphey's latest "Baseline" post [1] covers this pretty well. Not sure I'd include Node, but ES2015, modules, testing and build tools/automation for sure. You should know your way around the browser dev tools, have a good handle on async and promises and understand the DOM and events. [1]: http://rmurphey.com/blog/2015/03/23/a-baseline-for-front-end-developers-2015/ http://rmurphey.com/blog/2015/03/23/a-baseline-for-front-end...