Has anyone made it to the point in which they feel comfortable with Node, Angular, Express, and MongoDB?
I have been working on the back-end certificate for month, I did a node course on Udemy (which helped a lot), but every time I make it to the next challenge e.g. learnyoumongo, I feel hopeless. I think these tutorials are so bad because they just tell you to type things in and you have no idea what any of it means. The time estimates for these challenges is about three hours, and it took me a couple weeks just to understand what node is and what it does (alongside npm).
If anyone has self-taught the back-end fundamentals please let me know if you have any tips for mastering Git and everything in the MEAN stack By this point, I am sure that three hours is a huge underestimate for earning these technologies.
My front-end certificate went by sooooo much quicker, I killed it in two months. I did run into roadblocks but I was never as confused and lost as I am now. Itâs been a month of learning back-end and I feel like I still donât really get it, uuuuugh! Moreover, I feel that when I do get to the back-end projects, I am going to have a deep feeling of hopelesness. From experience I know that tutorials are one thing, but projects are a whole new array of challenges 
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Yeah - the Node / Mongo tutorials on the curriculum map are pretty hopeless for beginners, and they are being phased out in the new curriculum.
I had to watch hours and hours of videos on YouTube (from Microsoft) to understand what Node and express were doing, and also read the Node / Express docs âfrom cover to coverâ a few times to try and learn all the features and patterns.
It is hard! Way harder than the front end course.
The microservice challenges break down the requirements into manageable chunks, but I still had to do a lot of digging to make it work. Bear with it, though. I know this is gonna sound ridiculous from your current vantage point but it is actually quite simple to make a basic backend API - ONCE you know how to wire up Node and Express with a MongoDB.
One good overview course (free) is the MongoDB University courses for Javascript/Node. A new class is starting soon, so I recommend signing up for that. It helps piece the knowledge together better.
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Thanks @JacksonBates ! That was definitely helpful. When I finished the front-end I was thinking âat this rate, Iâll be done with the back-end by the end of OctoberââŚaaaaand PSYCHE! Ok, Iâm going to read the docs thoroughly and check that course out!
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You really gotta first figure out full stack architecture. Once you wrap your head around that, then you can break down ones, like MEAN and LAMP and Ruby on Rails. You got understand the importance of the server side architecture first
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