JavaScript: From First Steps to Professional

Wrapping Up

Anjana Vakil

Anjana Vakil

Software Engineer & Educator
JavaScript: From First Steps to Professional

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The "Wrapping Up" Lesson is part of the full, JavaScript: From First Steps to Professional course featured in this preview video. Here's what you'd learn in this lesson:

Anjana wraps up the course by answering student questions regarding how to think about programming paradigms in JavaScript and if companies are more often using pure JavaScript or JavaScript with a framework such as React.

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Transcript from the "Wrapping Up" Lesson

[00:00:00]
>> So those are the last JavaScript keywords I just wanted to mention to you that exist. But at this point, we have taken our first steps into the infinite universe of learning JavaScript. So let's take a moment to recap what we've seen and feel really good about ourselves because we have some badass new magic powers to work with JavaScript.

[00:00:30]
We are the baddest witches in town now that we have learned so many different tricks and we've got so many different tools in our JavaScript toolbox. So let's take a moment and appreciate everything that we've just crammed into our brains in this course. So we started back. It's been 80 full years since we were talking about basic values in JavaScript, strings, and numbers, and Booleans, and undefined, and null, and more complex values too, arrays and objects.

[00:01:00]
And over the course, we've learned more and more intricate kind of fancy ways of interacting with these complex values like arrays and objects. So, we've really wrapped our heads around what are the things in the JavaScript universe. We've also wrapped our heads around how to remember things with variables and how scope comes into play to help us understand where variables are in play.

[00:01:25]
For example in functions, so we can use functions to do things and within functions, we can have our own kind of limo with tinted windows, our own scope of, in the function, variables and values that the function can work with. And this is how we can kind of understand what JavaScript is seeing in different chunks of our code here based on how variables and scope work and functions are one of the places where we get a new scope.

[00:01:55]
We also talked about doing things, we figured out how to listen for events from the browser so that we know when somebody has clicked on a button or hovered over an element. And we can handle it, we can use our event listeners and click Handler or mouse over handler functions to do something to the page or to load more data or to do whatever we want.

[00:02:18]
We also talked about how to decide what to do with conditionals, with if else statements or with our fancy conditional ternary operators. We also figured out how to do things more than once with loops. We got for loops, we got while loops. We have maps and filter over arrays.

[00:02:36]
So we learned a whole bunch of different ways to do things, decide what to do, do things multiple times and do whatever we want with our JavaScript. And we looked at some actually pretty advanced JavaScript concepts. We talked about how asynchronous code works in JavaScript. We had our, Await friend that helps us work with asynchronous code as if it was synchronous code.

[00:03:01]
We also have understand that we have async functions as distinguished from regular functions. So we learned that pretty tricky, if you ask me, part of JavaScript, how JavaScript thinks about time and when things happen in JavaScript. We started looking at it. We also learnt some fancy syntax, right?

[00:03:20]
We learned, for example those conditional ternary operators with a question mark. We learned about destructuring, we learned about the spread... That we can use to kind of spread out elements from an array. We learned all kinds of fancy syntax error, arrow functions, fat arrows. And all of that stuff is really kind of modern, relatively new in JavaScript.

[00:03:41]
It is getting more and more common, so we're gonna run into that as we read JavaScript and write JavaScript around the web. And we looked even at some more real world skills like debugging. We talked about error handling just now. We talked about how to kind of work with our browser as a companion to help us develop the websites that we want to, using the console for example, and using our dev tools.

[00:04:11]
So we talked really about some real-world professional context skills that we're gonna need, using modules, for example, when we go out into the real world, into the wide world of web development in the wild, as we could say. So really, really, really amazing job, you all, this is a lot that we've worked through.

[00:04:36]
It's been a journey. We have taken our first steps and then some. And you all have just been asking amazing questions, you've been doing great job on these projects. We've built some simple but pretty dynamic websites to fetch dogos and quiz each other and do other things. So, from here, let's keep going.

[00:04:59]
Let's continue digging deeper, let's continue our infinite to JavaScript journey. There are so many other great courses on Frontend masters that you can take to continue learning more about more advanced JavaScript. Some learning in more detail, some of the async stuff, some of the module stuff, different techniques for working with complex JavaScript code bases.

[00:05:24]
And there are also some other great courses on things like, TypeScript. If you don't like the loosey gooseyness for example of JavaScript when it comes to working with types or the number of arguments you can pass into a function, something like TypeScript might be a nice alternative for you.

[00:05:41]
And we talked briefly a little bit about working with frameworks like React or Angular or View, and so there are all kinds of amazing courses on Frontend Masters, courses on dev tools in the browser and how to be effective with those. So keep on going, please, don't let this be the last JavaScript course you take on Frontend Masters.

[00:06:01]
On FrontendMasters.com, if you go to /learn, you can actually find guided paths through all of these amazing courses that are available. So, you can take different paths in for example, looking at JavaScript in depth, so going through a whole bunch of different topics or Node, we mentioned, is the back end a server side version of JavaScript.

[00:06:24]
Or those frameworks, react, view, angular, we can talk about TypeScript learning, an alternative to JavaScript that's not so loosey goosey with its types and the arguments you pass in the functions and things like that. And functional JavaScript is another, I'm a big fan of functional programming in JavaScript.

[00:06:44]
I think it makes working in JavaScript much nicer and easier. So you can continue with functional programming, which we've talked about a tiny bit, and all kinds of other great stuff on FrontendMasters.com/learn. So please continue, go through the Learning Paths, explore the other courses available, don't let this be the last JavaScript or web development course that you take on Frontend Masters please cuz there's so much more to learn.

[00:07:08]
And there are also other resources out there that can help you really, really solidify some of the mental models that we've been building in this course. For example, there's a great email based course called Just JavaScript that you can check out that will really get into really what's happening with variables and pointers and things like that.

[00:07:32]
And of course, there is the immense reference material on MDN and other sites that are out there where you can learn so much more about not only different methods and spells that you can cast on arrays and strings and all kinds of other stuff in JavaScript, but also some high level concepts around how the web works and how HTML and CSS and JavaScript all work together.

[00:07:58]
So keep exploring, keep investigating and keep playing. Keep tinkering, keep exploring in the console stuff that's happening. Keep writing your own JavaScript code and trying out new things. And just keep going, keep exploring continue stepping forward through your JavaScript journey because as I said, at the beginning of the course this is a never ending process, so we're all constantly learning, I'm constantly learning JavaScript for sure.

[00:08:28]
And we have just to keep going and sort of sometimes it gets a little frustrating because JavaScript can be weird sometimes. Sometimes there's historical accidents, but if we keep poking around, we will find the tools that we need to be successful in our JavaScript adventures, and make our computers do what we want and cast our magic spells on them.

[00:08:50]
So, thank you so much for participating in the course. Thank you so much for working through these projects and these examples and these 90s pop song references [LAUGH]. And huge, huge thank you to the Frontend Masters team that has been making this all happen. So huge thank you to everyone that has been a fundamental part of making this course happen and especially thanks to Mark Grabonski and Daniel Higginbotham who both helped a lot in developing this course, so helped me out.

[00:09:23]
And thank you reveal.js for making slides that we could all look at. So most importantly, thank you all to you for going through this really adventurous journey into our first steps with JavaScript. Thank you so much.
>> Go and build amazing software.
>> Yes, go on, go forth, live long and JavaScript and thank you all one more time for being such an amazing partner in going through our first steps here.

[00:09:54]
Thank you so much. Take care.
>> [APPLAUSE]
>> All right that's a wrap.

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