I’m not talking about learning to code from scratch, I mean like when there’s new tech like react, webpack or babel and there aren’t many courses freely available.
I’m trying to learn to set up a react app from scratch so I can understand how it works and I just can’t get it to work right. Either the guides are outdated, documentation confusing and so on.
How do you go about this kind of problem?
I can’t speak to the other technologies, but the facebook documentation tells you how to set up a single-page app with create-react-app. Have you tried googling? I am moving off codepen and found a tutorial specific for my (free) IDE: VSCode.
Get the course outline from the best course you get in Udemy and try to find resources on each topic from google, youtube n all. m still on basics but just another thought…
Try using it and Google your errors.
What do you do if:
Read the base documentation.
Most of the these technologies have a website with current documentation. Most courses/tutorials never get updated so it’s important that you find the documentation and contrast and compare. It sucks but it’s a reality of the world.
When I was learning PHP, I would make notes in my books when the documentation had updates. did the same for Electron.
For react: https://reactjs.org/
When it comes to new tech, usually you only have a few choices, you can google all you want, but if what your learning came out yesterday, you probably wont find anything. Obviously check the primary sources like provided documentation, help guides, change log, issues opened on github for the new feature/tech, commit logs.
There are a lot of avenues you can go down to find your answers outside of just googling it and searching on stack overflow. (especially for open source software), hell for things like javascript you can dive into the code yourself and see if you can find anything.
But for most large “tech” you should be able to find documentation of some kind somewhere, and there is where google-fu helps the most.
Welcome to programming I guess? There’s almost nothing you’ll use that won’t have at least one (its normally all) of these issues. It will take time, but the more you search and read and understand documentation and online articles, the more you’ll build up an internal filter of what’s useful and what isn’t — for example, with the techs you mentioned, you’ll find that you’ll start checking the date of when things were published, and discounting stuff that’s more than a couple of years old. There’s not an easy answer: there are a few things with very good documentation in a vast sea of things with bad/outdated/no documentation (and where resources to help with them are thin on the ground). React has pretty good documentation, Webpack has ok docs that are much better than they were, Babel has minimal but very useful docs (but it doesn’t do much on its own, other things interact with it).
Since you are not totally brand new to this either, I would recommend finding simple apps built with React on Github (like, really simple) and read the code.
Try to reason about the structure and conventions you spot. It should make the docs feel a little less abstract.
I’m in a simiilar situation, so it is great that I found this thread. Thanks for sharing your experience, guys!