I just finished the first book in the YDKJS series and highly recommend it. I know I know, I shouldn’t be reading or studying so much while abroad, but I can’t help myself. I have to say the book is extremely informative for any beginner. You’re quickly run through JS basics (much faster than Codecademy) and then some.
The two main takeaways for me are: 1. You’ll never fully master JS since it’s ever evolving 2. Depth in understanding is absolutely a goal. The series truly drives this point home and is right in line with where I want to take my learning.
I also had the chance to be introduced to two new awesome concepts that I look forward to diving into more later. The first were closures, which “give you a way to remember and continue to access a functions scope (its variables) even once the function has finished running.” This was quickly discussed on Codecademy, but not in such simple terms.
The last piece, which I’m still trying to wrap my head around are modules. Modules are a usage of closures, which “allow you to define private implementation details that are hidden from the outside world.” In any case, I did some further exploration of modules on the web and found that they are used to help maintain and scale your code base. It creates a simple mechanism to deprecate old modules and update them across the system without ruining the whole program. Hopefully this is a solid understanding so far, but I’ll further update if I’m wrong.
That’ll be enough of an update for now. I’ll be back soon after reading the next book in the series.
Side note: I wish I had a computer to write and test out code in the browser console. For now, pen and paper will have to suffice.