Vacation from Vanilla JavaScript

After spending the last couple of weeks completely focused on JavaScript, I was starting to feel the fatigue. I've definitely come a long way in that time with my JavaScript skills, yet I still have a long way to go. I know any programming language is hard to learn, but I think learning your first programming language is probably the hardest. There are a lot of concepts that are similar from one language to the next, just like there are in human languages; for the most part, the differences are in the syntax. Every language has it's strange quirks, and JavaScript has many; these quirks definitely add to the complexity. Needless to say, it can be a grueling task to learn that first language, but the key is to avoid getting to the point of giving up. To avoid throwing my computer out the window, I decided to put my focus elsewhere and learn something else while I regrouped. I'm almost ready to get back on the JavaScript warpath as my wounds have almost healed.

I stayed on freeCodeCamp to see what they had to offer and found the Frontend Libraries certification section. This section started out with Bootstrap, which is always fun to mess around with, but is rather light in the way of learning, especially because I've learned quite a bit of it already. Then, we moved into jQuery, a framework that is, by all means, dead. However, there are some cool tricks you can do with jQuery and my understanding of it grew quite a bit in a short period of time. After I completed this section, I moved on to Sass, which proved to be a lot more complex than I had given it credit for. Honestly, I thought it was just a way to organize your CSS a little better, but it turns out it borrows a lot of concepts from JavaScript, such as assigning variables and if/else statements. Sass is really cool, and this short introduction piqued my curiosity; I'll have to dive deeper into this soon.

I just completed the React section, and learned a lot more than I thought I would, considering I've worked with it so extensively through various courses. This proves that this style, giving a short lesson followed by an obligatory exercise, is a superior way of learning. Instead of just listening along to the instructor and then typing what they type to create something, you have to figure it out on your own. They typically give you quite a bit of boilerplate for the exercise, but that actually helps you focus on the particular concept they are teaching. There were things I thought I knew and had implemented many times in tutorials, but when I went to do the exercise, I found myself consulting my good friend Google for some help. I'm frightened of the upcoming section, Redux. Redux is incredibly complex, but I'm hopeful that this style of learning will shed light on what had historically been a very fuzzy technology for me. I'm going to give it my all. The section finishes off with a section on React and Redux combined and then 5 or 6 projects I'll have to complete from start to finish on my own. I would really like to complete this entire certification, but that will take a while and I won't be able to focus on JavaScript solely for some time. Decisions will have to be made in the upcoming days.

Until tomorrow!