JavaScript & JetBrains Academy

After my road to the C Programming Language I decided to look for another more intuitive language and because I didn’t wanted to focus on backend or frontend I went for the Programming Language JavaScript.

JavaScript was introduced in 1995 as a way to add programs to web pages in the Netscape Navigator browser. The language has since been adopted by all other major graphical web browsers. It has made modern web applications possible — applications with which you can interact directly without doing a page reload for every action. JavaScript is also used in more traditional websites to provide various forms of interactivity and cleverness.

To get in touch with this knowledge I read the free online book Eloquent JavaScript written by Marijn Haverbeke, I hardly recommend it. It has some translations as well, you can read it in English, Spanish, Arabic, Bulgarian, Portuguese and Russian. It also has exercises which you can do by using the Code Sandbox and also to see the solutions.

To get a bigger picture I will talk a bit about how JavaScript is organized:

There are 4 types of principle values the numbers, strings, Booleans and undefined values. This values can be “true” or “false”, numbers “13”, strings “abc”, etc. You can combine and transform values with operators. We talk about operators when we use (+, -, *, / and %) as arithmetic, we also find (+) for string concatenation, comparison (==, !=, ===, !==, >,<, ≥, ≤), logic (&&, ||), unitary operators ( “-” to negate a number, “!” to negate logically, and “typeof” to find a value’s type), and a ternary operator ( ?: ) to pick one of two values based on a third value.

There are also the statements that will introduce disturbances in the flow of control by using conditional (if, else and switch) and looping (while, do and for).

Last but not least we find the functions, this are special values that encapsulate a piece of program. We write them as functionName(argument 1, argument 2).

To get more practice I also used the platform JetBrains Academy. It has different study plans depending on which programming language or path you are willing to follow. It cough my interest the Web Development plan.

I find very attractive and intuitive how the study plan is distributed (table view in picture attach above) as well as the practical exercises and projects available to do using and downloading their IDE’s, in my case I’m using the WebStorm.

Table view of my study plan of Web Development in JetBrains Academy.

What I specially liked about this plans and tracks is that not also you are able to learn a new language instead you get to practice the whole knowledge as JavaScript, HTML, CSS and more to develop the tasks of a Web Developer.

Some exercises from JetBrains Academy I did with WebStorm

In Conclusion, I will say that there is a lot of sources that offer FREE education courses specially in the programming studies and the time is now so go ahead and give a try. I find that the most important aspect about coding is to never stop learning and always have this hunger motivation to try and learn always new knowledge in the tech field.