How to Become a Good JavaScript Developer — The Basics
By: John Au-Yeung
Tags: JavaScript, Programming, Web Development, Technology, Software Development

Photo by Vasily Koloda on Unsplash

If you want to become a JavaScript developer, we just have to do a few simple steps.

They’re simple, but that doesn’t mean they’re easy. In this article, we’ll look at how we can all become good JavaScript developers.

Start With the Basics

We got to learn the good parts of JavaScript, which includes many basic building blocks that we need to build good JavaScript programs.

Now it’s a great time to learn JavaScript since a lot of the good parts are added in the last few years. We can do a lot with the good parts of JavaScript.

The basics include defining and using variables, defining and using strings, array manipulation, and functions.

Those are the building blocks of JavaScript. Since 2015, the features that are added are good.

We can declare variables with let and const . Strings are used everywhere to store text.

The basics also include the use of operators to do arithmetic and assigning values to variables.

They include operators like add, subtract, multiply, divide and assignment. String concatenation is also an important operator to learn, even though it’s been replaced by template string in a lot of cases. This means that template strings are also important since they make our code cleaner.

Arrays and Loops

Arrays are used to store lists of data. We should use to learn the array methods thoroughly and use them. This is to minimize the use of loops.

However, loops are still very useful, so we should use them. Loops let us traverse through lists of data when array methods aren’t adequate.

Objects, Constructors, and Classes

To store data in an organized way, we should use objects. This way, we can group variables as properties of an object.

We should also learn about all the ways that objects can be created. This includes object literals and constructor functions/classes.

Object literals are the process of creating objects outright without calling a constructor or a class.

Constructors are functions that returns objects that have the same members, including instance variables and methods and static methods.

There’re no private variables in JavaScript constructors right now, but they’re being planned.

Also, we should know the instance methods are properties of the prototype property of a constructor. They’re called on the object when we need to call instance methods.

A prototype is template objects that an object inherits from. Most objects inherit from objects.

If we’re going top create constructors, we should use the class syntax. It makes our constructor look more like a regular class, even though it doesn’t act like a regular class underneath.

It adds more error checking to the constructor code we create so we won't make mistakes as easily as with the old constructor function syntax.

This part definitely trips people up if we’re used to class-based object-oriented languages.

Functional programming

Functional programming concepts are applied throughout the JavaScript language.

For instance, higher-order functions are used everywhere. They’re used in many array methods like map and reduce , which takes a callback function that’s called when we try to get new results from an existing array.

Also, callbacks are used a lot for asynchronous programming, which is required for making any nontrivial JavaScript program since they need to call callbacks so that the program won’t hold up other parts of a program from running.

We need asynchronously code a lot since JavaScript is a single-threaded language, so we callbacks to run code later in an indeterminate amount of time.

Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash

Asynchronous Programming

As we mentioned above, we use callbacks a lot for asynchronous programming. To make async programming cleaner, we use promises to avoid nesting callbacks.

To make promises cleaner, we use the async and await syntax to make things even cleaner.

Therefore, we should learn the syntax to write some clean async code.

Testing

Automated testing is important since we don’t have time to check every part of our program all the time. Therefore, we should write tests to do this for us.

To do that, we should write tests and use test runners like Jest to run them. This way, we know that our app is still working properly.

Conclusion

The basic knowledge for becoming a good developer is a lot. First, we have to learn toe basics, then we have to get to think like async programming, functional programming, and automated tests.

Practice them all and we all can become good JavaScript developers.