Forem: Exceptional Programming

Tips on Learning Reacting JS – Part 2 – Take an Online React Training Course

Exceptional Programming — Sat, 09 Apr 2022 18:01:14 +0000

This article was originally published in my blog www.exceptionalprogramming.com

Introduction

React JS is one of the most popular and in-demand pieces of software in the world. If you have a desire to learn React this article will benefit you. This three-part series will give you great tips on how to become excellent at React. Once you have learned React you can use it to boost your attractiveness with employers, as an in-demand freelancer, or for your own personal projects. This article is part two of the tips on how to learn React series. If you missed part one in which I explored how you can learn React by using the official React JS documentation website you can read it here.This article is part two of the series and is going to cover how taking a React course taught online by an instructor is another excellent way to learn React.

Benefits of Taking an Online React Course

Here are some reasons why learning React online through a course is a good option to consider.

Convenience – Let’s face it nowadays everyone is busy with schedules that often change quickly at a moment’s notice. That’s why learning React online through a course can be beneficial as you have the convenience of learning based on your personal schedule.

Cost – There are a lot of courses online for React you can take at an affordable price. The majority of these courses are less than $100 with some even as low as $20. Honestly, if you see a course over for over $100 I would continue to look as there are many you can find for less with just as much value. The return on your investment in buying a React course online is exponential as learning the in-demand skill of React can lead to a job of $70,000 and above in the United States with many React developers making over $100,000 once they gain more experience.

Learn at Your Own Pace – Each person has varying amounts of time they can commit each week to learn React. For instance, one individual might work full time and can only commit 15 hours a week to learn while another because of their life circumstances can put in over 30 hours into learning. Moreover, people will come to React with different levels of software knowledge, from someone with years of front-end development knowledge to a person that is completely new to software development. That’s why React online courses are a good fit because it allows you to learn at your own pace.

Three React Courses You Can Consider Taking

John Smilga – John Smilga is the founder of the popular youtube channel Coding Addict which has over 145,000 followers. He is an expert on the front-end software technologies of Javascript, HTML, CSS, and React. John’s React course has over 50 hours of video content, 20 articles, 10 downloadable resources, full lifetime access, and a certification of completion given once done. As of this writing, his course is only around $20 which makes it a bargain for the valuable information that’s provided. One great thing about this course is it’s full of projects you complete while going through the learning material. That is a plus because you are not only learning dry technical concepts which at times can be easy to forget but you are actually learning by building practical projects. In addition, once the course is completed you now have a number of projects you can put on your portfolio and GitHub when looking for React jobs. I can personally attest John has an excellent course because I took this course to learn React and had a wonderful experience. If you would like to learn more about this course you can do so here.

Colt Steele – Colt has a number of tech courses on Udemy with a youtube channel that has over 200,000 followers. He’s had former students land jobs at top tech companies like Google, Pinterest, and Apple. Colt’s React course has more than 39 hours of video content, 4 articles, 2 downloadable resources, a certification of completion, and more than 30,000 students that have gone through the course. You can purchase his course for $99 or choose the $29 monthly access option that Udemy offers. Colt’s course is one of the most popular React courses out there and if you would like to discover more about it you can here.

Mosh Hamedani– Mosh is a software engineer with over two decades of experience and is a well-known online software instructor with a youtube channel of over 2 million followers. His youtube channel has some informative React tutorials you can watch for free but if you are serious about learning all that React has to offer, purchasing his comprehensive course is the best option. Mosh’s course has over 13 hours of video, downloadable source code, exercises and solutions, and a certificate of completion all for $19. You can explore and learn more about his course here.

In Conclusion

This article showed how you can learn React JS by taking courses taught online by instructors. I provided three React course instructors that could be an excellent option if you would like to take the next step and start learning React. There are other React instructors out there as well so feel free to do more research on which courses could be a good fit for you. I would definitely recommend reading the reviews of students who have taken the courses to get an idea if it user friendly and people are actually learning React proficiently.

Please like and share this article if you found helpful.
You can check out some of my other articles on my blog www.exceptionalprogramming.com

Tips on Learning Reacting JS – Part 1 – Using the React Doc

Exceptional Programming — Wed, 30 Mar 2022 06:26:45 +0000

This article was originally published in my blog www.exceptionalprogramming.com

Introduction

React JS is one of the most popular and in-demand pieces of software in the world. If you have a desire to learn React this article will benefit you. This three-part series will give you great tips on how to become excellent at React. Once you have learned React you can use it to boost your attractiveness with employers, as an in-demand freelancer, or for your own personal projects. This article is part one of the tips on how to learn React series. Don’t feel like you have to master everything in part one before implementing what’s in the other article parts ahead. If anything it’s best to do the various items recommended in the series in combination with one another.

Using the React Doc

You’re probably thinking that the React doc is a waste of time and won’t be fruitful. Especially if you want to become proficient in React as soon as possible. Many software docs give the reader lots of dry technical terms that are not interactive nor user friendly. However, that is not the case with the React documentation. Now that we’ve got that covered let’s start exploring the variety of resources that are available with the React doc.

Practical Tutorial

If you prefer learning through application, React’s doc offers a practical tutorial. With this tutorial, you get to build a playable game using React. Consequently, you immediately get to start working with React and can begin gaining familiarity with how it operates. Kind of like taking a car for a test drive to see how it rides on the road. This tutorial is great also in that they have links at the end of sections that display how your React code should look so that the user is building the game correctly. In addition, the tutorial offers numerous high-quality screenshots making it easy to follow along while building the game.

Conceptual Step-by-Step Guide

React’s documentation also provides a conceptual step-by-step guide for those that learn better through theory when trying to understand something new. The conceptual guide is broken up into eight different sections :

Installation
Main Concepts
Advanced Guides
API References
Hooks
Testing
Contributing
FAQ

The guide is full of clickable links in each section so you can go deeper into different concepts of your choosing. For example, in the chapter on Components and Props, you can simply read the text to get a basic understanding or click on hyperlinked words like “ES6 class” and “as a function or class” to learn more about those individual concepts and how they correlate with the chapter you are reading. Like the practical tutorial, there are plenty of screenshots taken directly from React so its not just line after line of plain text.

Online Interactive React “Playgrounds”

Furthermore, the React doc features what they call online playgrounds. It allows users to play with React using CodePen, Code Sandbox, Stackblitz, or a downloadable HTML file. These online playgrounds are an excellent way to try React to decipher if you would like to go deeper with the software.

In Conclusion

This article showed you some of the various ways the React doc can assist in learning React.

Please like and share this article if you found helpful.

You can check out some of my other articles on my blog www.exceptionalprogramming.com

A Simple Way to Explain HTML, CSS and Javascript and How They Relate

Exceptional Programming — Tue, 29 Mar 2022 02:56:24 +0000

This article was originally published in my blog www.exceptionalprogramming.com

Want to know a simple way to understand three of the most important front-end elements of software web development?

This article will do just that as it will explain how Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and Javascript work in harmony to bring about the beautiful web pages we all interact with every day.

First, let’s read over the sentence “The Brown Dinosaur Danced.” In this sentence we could use HTML to represent “Dinosaur(noun)”, CSS for “Brown (adjective)”, and Javascript for “Danced (verb).”

HTML consists of items like paragraphs, and headings which are like the nouns in a sentence as they are the main structures/characters. CSS, you can think of as adjectives because they describe and give a deeper understanding of HTML.

For example, if you have a heading on a website with CSS you can add a number of styles to it like making it bold, capitalizing, making it a particular font, etc.

Finally, we can look at Javascript as the verb because it allows the user to see and do actionable steps on the screen like computing numbers or pressing a button on a screen that leads to another website link. That is why the example sentence at the beginning of the article that “danced” was used to describe Javascript as it shows the brown Dinosaur doing something like dancing.

This was a brief synopsis of how HTML, CSS, and Javascript work together. It’s not meant as an exhaustive deep dive into the concepts but just a simple way for beginners on these concepts to better understand how they relate with one another.

Please like and share this article if you found helpful.

You can check out some of my other articles on my blog www.exceptionalprogramming.com

Learn All About MDN Web Doc's Newly Redesigned Website

Exceptional Programming — Sun, 27 Mar 2022 19:23:58 +0000

MDN web docs (previously called Mozilla Developer Network or simply MDN) on March 1st, 2022 launched their newly redesigned website. This article will go over some of the exciting changes they made so you can get the most out of your future visits to their site.

A New Community-Centered Homepage

Everything MDN does revolves around the community of developers that either contributes to it or use it as a reference point for their projects. The homepage now reflects this through a centrally located search bar making it easily accessible for the MDN community as well as a featured articles section and a list of the newest additions to the Github content repo. Finally, at the bottom of the page, there is a contributor spotlight area that displays a personally written from a member of the MDN community.

Improved, User-Friendly Article Pages

With a five-year gap between any major alterations to the design of the article pages, MDN felt it was crucial for a new look to be implemented. Now, for instance, there is a more homogeneous color scheme across all of the article pages, and larger display links to the most often searched subjects like CSS and Javascript. Another cool feature added is at the top right-hand corner of the screen you have the option of clicking on a button to change between a light or dark screen mode. You can check out an article page for yourself here.

Community Picked New Logo

MDN recognized that with a newly retooled website that it only fitting to include a new logo. MDN wanted a logo that was very contemporary but also showed the core essence of what they stood for as a brand. The MDN community had the opportunity to choose between 8 logo designs with the number one choice being the letter “M” in a monogram font with an underscore symbol to represent the process of code writing.

Hope this article was helpful in learning some of the new features to the MDN site. You can check out some of my other posts here.