The Best Way To Learn Frontend As An Experienced Programmer
Tags: javascript, frontend
Published: 2021-12-31 01:28:21

---
title: The Best Way To Learn Frontend As An Experienced Programmer
published: true
date: 2021-11-23 15:33:36 UTC
tags: JavaScript,Frontend
canonical_url: http://coderscat.com/the-way-to-learn-frontend/
---

I have done some front-end programming recently. Even I have been coding for almost 16 years, I haven’t done much on the front-end in my coding time.

The reason is, I never found Front-end programming interesting. I thought front-end is only manipulate the HTML elements, and provides some styles for the UI of web. I found CSS is trivial and there is not logic behind the css code. We must remember a lot of stuff to write CSS. I don’t want to remember …

Until recently, I have done more work in front-end. My career don’t involve front-end much , but I have spent some time to learn it by myself. The motivation behind it is my side-project.

I finished several projects in my spare time, and got more interests on it. Here are some of my projects:

- [gomoku](https://github.com/chenyukang/gomoku)
- [obweb](https://github.com/chenyukang/obweb)

So, with about one year experiences of practice, I improved much on it. I found these rules for learning front-end as an experienced programmer. It also may help for beginners:

### Learn by doing

This is always my #1 role of learning programming.

I guess I still won’t have learned frontend programming without my side-project. I have some desire on my side-project, I tried to finish it with perfection in my mind.

Learning frontend is the extra credits of finishing my projects. So, if you don’t have much desire on learning frontend(or programming), maybe you need to find some thing which interested you, try to find those things attract you desire. For instance, if you want to develop a game, you may need to learn Game programming or something like C++ programming.

When you begin to get hands dirty with your keyboard, other things will follow.

If you don’t find any good project to start with, here are some learn-by-doing style of courses:

[Learn to Code (freecodecamp.org)](https://www.freecodecamp.org/learn)

### Play with open-source projects

It’s the best time for learning programming right now. Compared with 10 years ago, we have many many open-source projects to learn.

As as a beginner in front-end, I get much fun and interests when I played all the demo of this project: [Mini projects built with HTML5, CSS & JavaScript.](https://github.com/bradtraversy/vanillawebprojects).

I read the source code of each sub-project, and try to do some modification on them. After finish it, I learned a lot.

### Read Books, Ignore Videos

When you want to go deeper about front-end, there are actually a lot of theory stuff need to learn. For these essential knowledge, I would suggest you to learn by reading some classic books, such as:

- [The Modern JavaScript Tutorial](https://javascript.info/)
- [JavaScript: The Definitive Guide: Activate Your Web Pages](https://amzn.to/3nGQB2j)

There are many videos for learning Web development, it’s only helpful when you are starting without any experience. If you have got some learning experience, you should step out relay on watching those videos. Because almost none of them will teach you deeper skills and knowledges. Classic books and other authoritative materials will be helpful.