This content originally appeared on Level Up Coding - Medium and was authored by Adam Sokołowski
Nowadays, it seems fairly easy to become a front-end developer, even without prior coding experience.
Online or offline bootcamps, courses, tutorials — landing a high-paying job is all but certain and it doesn’t even take years to complete. 🤔
And learning just the framework, which could only take a few weeks, might help you find employment as soon as you finish your education!
So why would you spend more time, money, and effort than you have to?
To me, the right question to ask is: Will the knowledge you gain in such a short period provide a strong enough foundation for your career?
“Whatever I don’t know, I’ll learn on the job, or I’ll get it later”
Will you, though? It’s a maybe at best.
That is, if you are fortunate enough to be hired for your first job in an environment with a career path and a mentor nearby; an environment that follows best practises and has a solid architecture and stable codebase.
I assure you, it’s not like that everywhere.
But what’s the problem anyway?
Example: With Vue as the primary focus of your course, what else can you realistically learn in a few weeks or months? How much of it will you remember?
Are you going to learn data types, structures, programming paradigms, design patterns (which would take months, if not years, to understand on your own), various types of loops, good practices, principles, git and other tools, or… just elementary Vue?
Try to consider it this way: Your job will become a nightmare if you don’t know the fundamentals of software engineering or even the go-to tools.
Without fairly complete knowledge, it will be difficult for you to define the problem you are trying to solve, which will cause you to waste time working on the wrong issue before becoming frustrated and panicking.
You will struggle to come up with a unique solution on your own, and you may be stuck with repetitive, boring work that no one else wants — not exactly a confidence booster.
Debugging requires some skill. How will you debug your framework code, which has been transpiled into JavaScript?
I’m afraid that at some point, you’ll run into problems that require solid foundations to solve, forcing you to go back to school.
Frameworks come and go
Every few months, a new one is released that is simpler, easier to learn, better, lighter, and faster than all the others. It then gains attention, which usually fades quickly. And previous experience with one framework is rarely applicable to another.
Languages, principles, patterns, software engineering best practises, and tools all evolve. They are mostly universal and transferable.
Once you’ve mastered the fundamentals, learning the next language is as simple as becoming acquainted with new syntax, which you can do quickly and effectively. They all use similar types and variables, almost all have loops, follow design patterns, and fit into well-known programming paradigms.
Using the built-in features (that you have to know about in the first place) will improve your code, it’s performance and will be invaluable when determining the best way to solve the problem at hand.
With the exception of stylesheets, all front-end code will be written in JavaScript or TypeScript. Knowing those will help you understand any framework you will be working with.
Don’t get me wrong: without modern frameworks and the amazing communities that support them, we couldn’t do much. Simply put, it is not the best place to start your programming journey.
To finally finish my sermon…
I firmly believe in strong foundations and the importance of quality over quantity. Quality and solid foundations will always stand their ground.
Learn the most important, fundamental concepts first: the language that underlies the frameworks and the essentials of software engineering.
For the young, just starting front-end developers out there — if you’d like to have a long-lasting, interesting career — go an extra mile!
Start from JavaScript and how it interacts with the other languages of the web!
Good luck and happy coding!
Please do yourself a favour and learn the language before the framework! was originally published in Level Up Coding on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
This content originally appeared on Level Up Coding - Medium and was authored by Adam Sokołowski
Adam Sokołowski | Sciencx (2023-01-08T20:15:21+00:00) Please do yourself a favour and learn the language before the framework!. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2023/01/08/please-do-yourself-a-favour-and-learn-the-language-before-the-framework/
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