I have been in the software engineering industry for almost three years now, and I still have a lot of respect for JavaScript developers.
Last year, I had a chance to work with a team of JavaScript developers, and I saw how complicated their code was. Even though they were writing in ES6, they were using classes, functions, and variables all over the place. I was lost looking at the code.
I talked to one of my friends about my difficulties learning JavaScript, and he shared his own experience. He told me that he just quit his job as a JavaScript developer because he got tired of the language’s inconsistencies and complexities.
Another friend of mine told me that he was trying to learn ReactJS but it was too hard; he ended up learning Angular instead because it’s easier. He said that even with TypeScript on top of Angular, it’s still easier than ReactJS.
Based on these experiences, we can see that there are many challenges facing anyone who wants to learn JS. And this is not only my opinion; there are many other people who share the same views as well.
Let me explain why learning JS is so hard:
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people say, “JavaScript is a nightmare to learn.” I’m here to show you that learning JS is not as bad as it seems.
I’m going to assume that you have little to no familiarity with programming in general, so we’ll start right from the beginning.
If you’re experienced in programming and are curious to learn JavaSript, I have some resources for you too!
I had a dream. I dreamed it would be easy to learn JavaScript! It was not. I failed at my first attempt. I gave up and went back to doing what I was good at. But then something happened.
After a few years of working as an application developer, my curiosity got the better of me again. I had been looking at other people’s code and seeing this thing called JavaScript in the wild; it seemed like a really interesting language, one that could do a lot more than just add interactivity to web pages.
I decided to give it another shot because I wanted to know how much more there was to this language that drives the Internet today.
And that’s how this post came about. For those of you who are also struggling to learn JavaScript, or have tried and failed at it, or are even thinking of giving up on it, this post is for you.
I was so excited to learn JavaScript. I had already learned HTML, CSS and Python, so I thought learning JavaScript would be a breeze. I was wrong… I quickly realized that JavaScript is a very difficult programming language to master.
I’m the kind of person who will get frustrated easily. My parents used to tell me how I would scream and cry whenever they changed my favorite TV channel as a kid. When learning new things, being patient is not one of my strengths.
I don’t know why it took me months before coming to the realization that it’s not my fault that JavaScript is difficult to learn.
I felt guilty for not spending enough time on Free Code Camp or other online courses. I blamed myself for not having enough patience or discipline to keep going even though everything I tried didn’t work.
But just like reading a book, it takes you time to get fully immersed into the story and understand what’s happening, learning web development and programming is the same way too!
Learning new things takes time and effort, and it can be frustrating at times but you have to keep going in order to succeed in becoming a web developer or programmer!
JavaScript is a tough language to learn and many people quit before they even get started. JavaScript isn’t like the other programming languages where you just write code, compile it and boom, your program runs. There are a lot of other things you need to do to make it work.
To start off, before you even begin writing any code, you need to understand how JavaScript works with the browser. This can be a very confusing concept if you don’t have any experience with web development. I will assume that you have no knowledge of web development, so if you do know some web development concepts, then skip this paragraph or at least skim through it.
Web browsers use HTML (hypertext markup language) to display basic information on the page and CSS (cascading stylesheet) to style those elements on the page. In order for JavaScript to work with the webpage we need to add another element called a script tag into our HTML file.
But what exactly is a script tag? It’s just an element in our HTML file that lets us write JavaScript in our file. It looks like this: . Now your first thought might be, “Where does my JavaScript go?”. Well, after opening the script tag all we have to do is put
I didn’t think I was ever going to get it. I had been learning JavaScript for a few years now and I still didn’t feel like I had a good grasp on it.
It felt like there was always some new framework or library that I needed to learn in order to just get something basic done.
And every time I started learning some framework, there was another one right around the corner that would make my code obsolete.
I would start projects and never finish them because the code would get too complex and messy as the project grew.
I felt like I could never keep up and it seemed like everything was changing so quickly.
There are many programming languages, and JavaScript is one of them. I have been in the industry for more than a decade, and have come across many programming languages. I have worked on Java, PHP, Ruby, Python, C