How and Where I’ve Been (Re)Learning JavaScript

As I speed down the path to launch for my JavaScript for WordPress Master Course, I have been busily learning and relearning JavaScript anew.

Actually, I have worked with JS for a long time now and even taught college and high school JavaScript courses well before Treehouse.  However, JavaScript has come a long way in the last few years and I’d like to share and give thanks for all of the people and places I have been checking out to sharpen my skills and deepen my understanding.

 

First, A Thanks to Remkus and Wes

First, let’s all give thanks to Remkus de Vries for being the first person to really get a comprehensive study guide out to the community in response to Matt’s homework assignment.  Hopefully we’ve all read his Learning JavaScript in WordPress, Deeply article by now and took notes.

Others have written similar posts since then, but I particularly want to give a shout out to Wes Bos (an advisor to the course and an amazing JS trainer) who wrote an article with tons of resources for learning JavaScript.

 

You Don’t Know JS Book Series

Most of my re-learning of JavaScript has come from reading the series You Don’t Know JS.  This book is so good and really gets into the aspects of JavaScript that most people do not really take the time to learn.

This You Don’t Know JavaScript book series offers a contrary challenge: learn and deeply understand all of JavaScript, even and especially “The Tough Parts”.

Here, we address head on the tendency of JS developers to learn “just enough” to get by, without ever forcing themselves to learn exactly how and why the language behaves the way it does. Furthermore, we eschew the common advice to retreat when the road gets rough.

~ From the Preface of You Don’t Know JS: Up and Running, Kyle Simpson

I will likely make this book series pre-requisite / required reading for the course and will teach about all of the major topics it covers:

1. Scope
2. Closures
3. this
4. Object Prototypes
5. Asynchronous programming
6. Performance
7. ES6 (ES7 and beyond)

So, big shout out to the You Don’t Know JS Book Series, which you can get for free on Github.  I’d suggest start reading it now if you’re interested in my JS for WP master course 🙂

More JavaScript Books

There are other books on JavaScript as well, but I have already read the Definitive Guide, The Good Parts as well as a number of others.

Here are a few other JS books that have caught my eye and I plan to read through before I finish the course:

• Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja
• Speaking JS
• Effective JavaScript Development
• Building Isomorphic JavaScript Apps
• Programming JavaScript Applications
• Exploring ES6
• JavaScript Design Patterns
• JavaScript Challenges

 

Learning Via Videos

Lynda.com

A couple of weeks ago, a great member of the WordPress community, Roy Sivan (also an advisor to the course) launched a course on Lynda.com on Building a Single Page Application with AngularJS and WordPress.  That got me to sign up for a free account with Lynda.com so I could watch his course. Morten Rand-Hendriksen also teaches at Lynda and I checked out his courses on the REST API and Grunt and SASS.

Then, since I still had some time on my free account I proceeded to watch all of their intermediate and advanced JavaScript, Angular, React and Backbone courses as well 🙂

Udacity

Another online video site I heard about a lot while at Treehouse was Udacity.  I had never tried them before but I can say that they do have some great JS related content.  I signed up for a free account and checked out the following courses over there:

• JavaScript Design Patterns
• Web Tooling & Automation
• JavaScript Testing
• Designing RESTful APIs
• Object Oriented JavaScript
• Learn Backbone.js

I liked the Udacity courses, the content was pretty good and not just introduction level JavaScript (although they have that too).  Shout out to Ben Jaffe, the instructor for most of those courses, I dig your style man 🙂

React For Beginners

Wes Bos has a series on React for Beginners.  Since React, Backbone and Angular are newer to me, I have been soaking up everything I can on these frameworks.  I highly recommend watching Wes’s course on React.  I went for the package that lets you download the videos and watch them offline.

EggHead.io

I had not heard of this site until reading Wes’ article that I link to above.  However, the site has so many videos on advanced JS topics that I couldn’t not sign up for a Pro account.

I am currently watching their videos on the following topics:

• Angular2
• ES6
• Grunt
• React

Frontend Masters

I found this site because Kyle Simpson, the author of You Don’t Know JS, mentioned above, offers several courses there on advanced JavaScript topics.  I have learned a lot from these folks and this is one of the better advanced learning sites out there.  Here are just a few of the great courses they have I’ve been watching:

• Advanced JavaScript from Kyle Simpson
• Choosing a JavaScript Framework from Brian Holt of Reditt
• Asynchronous Programming in JavaScript (with Rx.js Observables) from
  Jafar Husain of Netflix (great teacher!)
• JavaScript the Good Parts, from the author of the book
• JS.Next: ES6
• More..

Articles, Tutorials and More Websites

Once I started building out the actual projects for the JS for WP Master Course I realized (as we all do) that reading books and taking courses wasn’t enough and I had to dig deeper into specifics of the JS language, the WP API, and related frameworks.

In no particular order, I found these resources pretty helpful:

• Scott Bolinger’s Blog
• The AppPresser Blog
• Everything Josh Pollock has written on the API
• JavaScriptIsSexy.com
• SitePoint’s articles on the WP API
• The WP API official docs
• Chris Hutchinson’s article on Building a Better WordPress
• Torque Mag (again thanks to Josh and Roy in large part)
• Roy Sivan’s blog
• WP Sessions has some great videos with experts like Rachel Baker
• The WP API JS Client
• All of the WordPress.tv talks on JavaScript, JS and the API
• The React Podcast and React Europe Talks

 

All of the JS for WP Master Course Advisors

I am so grateful for the list of 20+ advisors we have for the JS for WP Master Course.

When I taught at Treehouse I would occasionally ping experts with questions, but most of the courses were developed in isolation.  This course is completely different and I’m so much happier building a course with a panel of both technical advisors and experienced educators.

My meetings with the technical advisors mostly involves me picking their brains on specific things I don’t understand yet or just asking open ended questions and listening to them preach, ramble and often talk way over my head 🙂

The craft of an educator comes from an ability to learn something quickly and deeply, process it thoroughly, and reteach it to others in a way that makes sense and promotes the highest learning.  This is my skill and craft.  I also happen to know and love programming,  JS and WordPress, but I am first and foremost a teacher.

A huge thanks to the technical advisors who work with JS and the API on a day to day basis and have experience really getting into developing projects with the skills that the master course will cover.

To mention a few technical advisors specifically: Adam Silverstein, Bryce Adams, Kevin Stover, George Sephanis, Noel Tock, Brent Sheperd, Scott Bolinger and Josh Pollock.  Thanks folks!

I’ll write more in the future about the advisors (and the one’s with education experience in particular).

 

I Still Have A Lot To Learn

I have the utmost confidence, but I will also share it’s quite daunting to take on building a Masters level course on JavaScript for WordPress.

Most of my learning now has to do with the inner workings of Backbone, the changes in Angular2, how to best build with React and WordPress and the exciting changes with ES6.  Oh, and how to get Webpack working properly :p

Since the JS for WP Master Course will include Backbone, Angular and React projects, I am mostly learning through building at this point.

Shout out to the React and Angular WP admin boilerplates on Github and all of the people who have released Angular or React WP themes or projects.  I am trying to download and explore the code in everything I can find at this point.

 

How Have You Been Learning?

If you decide to wait to learn all of this stuff until my JS for WP Master Course comes out, I don’t blame you 😉

However, if you have been attempting to Learn JavaScript, Deeply on your own, I’d love to know about some of the resources you have found helpful.