I’m a beginner, to date having finished most of the FCC Front End certification (just the advanced projects left!). The YDKJS series comes highly recommended on this forum and elsewhere, so I thought I’d give them a go. Although I’m gaining insight into some really powerful concepts (particularly things like scope and object prototypes), there’s a TON that I just completely fail to grasp (@@iterators? Symbols? wut?).
How much should I be understanding at this point? Is this just something I should power through and come back to later in my journey as a developer? Are there other books that would build my understanding to the level where the YDKJS series would be more beneficial?
Really interested to hear you all’s thoughts. Thanks!
Depends on what is the best learning process for you. I myself rush through books and accept that I only grasp some of the ideas. But I do a lot of coding everyday so I eventually discover new things and when some of the concepts become clearer I come back to those books and read more. Learning this way is easier and less painful for me. But like I said it depends. Some people jus can’t accept that they don’t understand something and in order to proceed further they have to accomplish every step. For me it’s different. I fully embrace my stupidity and let myself learn in the process
I managed the first three YDKJS books a while back, but I don’t think they’re particularly effective in building you up from the ground up. I’d recommend that you try out Eloquent Javascript. I’ve learned a ton from it and there’s a lot of persistent example throughout the chapters. You might also try looking at some video courses as well. I’m a fan of Wes Bos’s JavaScript 30 for learning how to use plain jane Javascript to interact with HTML documents and Gordon Zhu’s Practical Javascript. I completed the JS section on the beta version of the site a few weeks ago and decided to take some time to really gain a healthy foundation in the language before moving on to frameworks like JQuery and React and those have been my resources so far; I’ll probably do YDKJS again once I’ve worked my way through those and have started back up with FCC.
