Edabit.com My Favorite Resource for JavaScript Practice Problems
Tags: javascript, productivity, algorithms, practice
Published: 2020-08-16 20:03:31

With the seemingly never ending supply of places to learn and practice JavaScript problems, it can be difficult to find the right one that matches your own personal learning style. After having tried the majority of the usual suspects, which are great don't get me wrong, I found that all I was really looking for was a simple site with a ton of JavaScript problems that I could practice everyday. After a little Googling I came across a site called edabit.com that turned out to be exactly I was looking for. 

Like any skill worth learning, daily practice is key on the long and hard road to mastery. This is what makes a site like edabit.com such a great learning tool. There are hundreds of JavaScript problems to solve that range in difficulty from very easy, all the way to expert. The no-nonsense interface does a great job of staying out of your way, and allowing you to focus solely on the problems. There is a calendar that tracks how many days in row that you've been coding, and you can level up based on the number of points that you earn. I personally use edabit.com for JavaScript, but there are several other languages to choose from. Which is awesome because I plan to learn C# and PHP in the future. 

Edabit.com's two most powerful features for learning, in my humble opinion, are the resources tab, and the ability to see other user's solutions once you've submitted your solution. Say you have tried to solve the problem on your own to no avail. If you click on the resources tab, you are presented with a list of links to resources that might be useful when it comes to solving that particular problem. There might be a link to MDN that explains Array.prototype.filter(), or a Wikipedia article explaining a particular math concept. For beginners especially, this feature gets them in the habit of checking the docs and trying to solve the problem on their own with Google when they are stuck. Also, a lot of the problems are solved utilizing the same methods and concepts, so you get a lot of opportunity to build programmer muscle memory. 

The ability to see other user's solutions to the same problem will also make you a much better programmer, provided that you actually take the time to look at the other solutions, and try to understand them. It always feels good to solve a problem on your own, but there is almost always a better way to solve it. On edabit.com, you can view the solution after you solve it on your own, or, if you're really stuck, you can give up the points you would have earned to unlock the other solutions. Either way you win because the other users almost always solve it differently than you did. It's easy to get into a groove and want to crush as many problems as you can, but if you don't skip this step you will become a much stronger coder in a shorter amount of time. 

Since I've ramped up my deep dive into JavaScript, edabit.com is shaping up to be an invaluable part of my daily course of study. My only complaint is that the site can be a little slow sometimes when it comes to checking and submitting your code. If you are looking for a place to practice JavaScript that gets out of your way and lets you practice a ton of problems, I strongly encourage you to give edabit.com a try. 

Happy coding!