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Joseph Louie
Joseph Louie

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How to learn the basics of the MERN Stack

Hi, my name's Joseph and learning new languages has always excited me. When I finished my boot camp I took some time to learn Node.js, more specifically the all so popular MERN stack. This will be a short blog about what I did to learn the basics of the MERN stack in 5hours. What I consider the basics of a web development language is being able to create a project with CRUD functionality (Create, Read, Update, Delete).

The first place I went to was FreeCodeCamp. They are a completely free site that teaches you everything you need in order to be a full-stack web developer. They teach the MERN stack, so I thought it was a good starting point. I finished Managing Packages with NPM, Basic Node and Express, and MongoDB and Mongoose.

I've built a javascript project before so managing packages with NPM wasn't hard. Basic Node and Express had a lot to do with routing, getting and sending things to different routes. It had me do a lot of initial setups which was fine. MongoDB and Mongoose are where I had a little bit of trouble because I didn't know how to connect to MongoDB Atlas which is essentially a cloud base database. I kept getting tripped up on the syntax which I had to google repeatedly, look at the documentation, or find youtube videos. I didn't do any of the projects they had listed because I wanted to create something on my own. The last thing I did was find a youtube video tutorial and follow it. This helps you understand how you can put all the pieces together and make a real project from it.

That's just my experience of learning something new. Tell me how you go about learning building a new project with technology you have never used before. I would love to hear about your experience!

Thank You for reading!

Resources:
FreeCodeCamp
TheOdin Project

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