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The Key
The Key

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Learning JS can be frustrating

Hello everyone.

One week ago I asked for some help for JavaScript. How to attempt it if you know C# and you're not that much interested in frontend / 'plain html scripting' like the most basic tutorials show you. The answer that I got was NodeJS.

So I jumped into it. Got an idea how it works and what I could probably do with it. Up to this point everything was fine. But then ...

I wanted to learn a new language. What I ended up with was a week full of research. And not in the good way.

  • I set up a node server. Easy.
  • After that I was slightly introduced to html and css - which is ok, its a part of web-dev even that I dont like it that much
  • And then there was express, body-parser, mysql/mongoose, jquery / ajax.
  • I had a simple HTML page and I could transfer some data. Thats great isnt it? ... Right? ...

Well no. I mean sure its great, I understood the functions as they where but I (and a friend of mine) wanted to know how the most stuff works just with HTML/CSS/JS incl. nodejs on the server side. ('learn the basics') It must be possible right? These are the basics which the whole web is based of. But to find some answers like "How do I send some data to the server" was quite a stressful research lesson if you dont use ajax / jquery.

Its nearly impossible to find the groundbreaking basics how all that works. Its not like we want to avoid express or the other libraries and frameworks etc. Just what is going on in the inner part of all that stuff, we dont know it so we searched for it. It took us nearly an hour to find the 'fetch' function. At the end it worked and we were happy. But still why is it so hard to find the real basics of JS? It feels like its getting an lost knowledge in all those nodejs+express(+ fit in any other module or framework here) tutorials.

Summary of my text: Learning javascript can be a pain. There are the basic tutorials that tell you how to write a script to change a text by clicking on a button, or the 'slightly' advanced ones how you build a server with node js and how all those modules are working. Plus everywhere is jquery and/or ajax included. I guess there is a better reason beside of "its easier with all those things" but its overwhelming. Each of those brings new syntax styles into the game ... its simply to much.

Thats all from me this week. I have to order all those links I collected over the last week and learn css grids now.

Have a nice weekend everybody!

Top comments (4)

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realedwintorres profile image
Edwin Torres

JavaScript itself is not difficult to learn. The challenge is understanding JavaScript's role in web development. Yes, there are Node.js modules that abstract the details of web services. But it starts with a fundamental understanding of the HTTP protocol with respect to web development: code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/http-t...

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tejaarukoti profile image
Teja Swaroop Arukoti

Similar pain I went through last week while learning NodeJS + MongoDB. All tutorials point to use of ExpressJS.

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key_user profile image
The Key

I hope you still achieved what you tried to learn?

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tejaarukoti profile image
Teja Swaroop Arukoti

Yes. :)