Hi HN,
I've only been doing web on the side in my career. Mostly doing Python, C++, Swift, although I build my websites on Rails. Did a lot of frontend web 15y ago when I was young but of course a LOT has changed since. I need to do web again for a simple web app, but boy is it confusing.
Today I realised that good old AJAX requests are now done via the fetch() API. Frustratingly, when trying to google for modern ways to do it (before I knew about fetch()), I just got SEO optimized pages that list every single method on the planet from XMLHttpRequest to jQuery to a gazillion libraries, and with the fetch() API buried somewhere in between. Obviously terrible for learning. -.-
I went down a similar rabbit hole as I was looking into bundlers. I'm a Rails guy, and have always stuck with the asset pipeline and avoided complex frontend build systems. As I was trying to play with Stimulus I had to choose between webpacker, jsbuilder and importmaps, and again it was a really long rabbit hole where I had to learn about importmaps, the difference between ESM vs CJS, and finally about Heroku (our host) not supporting HTTP/2 yet and thus being a bad platform for importmaps (unless you add a CDN). Fortunately, DHH's blog post about Rails' bundler journey was pretty enlightening on this front, but of course it took me a while to find it, and then I had to remember to double-check HTTP/2 support, which DHH took completely for granted.
For some reason every step in this learning journey is frustrating and confusing. Is there a learning resource that teaches you modern fundamental JS approaches AND puts them into context with older approaches, clearly also outlining which approaches are now deprecated and why?
I've only been doing web on the side in my career. Mostly doing Python, C++, Swift, although I build my websites on Rails. Did a lot of frontend web 15y ago when I was young but of course a LOT has changed since. I need to do web again for a simple web app, but boy is it confusing.
Today I realised that good old AJAX requests are now done via the fetch() API. Frustratingly, when trying to google for modern ways to do it (before I knew about fetch()), I just got SEO optimized pages that list every single method on the planet from XMLHttpRequest to jQuery to a gazillion libraries, and with the fetch() API buried somewhere in between. Obviously terrible for learning. -.-
I went down a similar rabbit hole as I was looking into bundlers. I'm a Rails guy, and have always stuck with the asset pipeline and avoided complex frontend build systems. As I was trying to play with Stimulus I had to choose between webpacker, jsbuilder and importmaps, and again it was a really long rabbit hole where I had to learn about importmaps, the difference between ESM vs CJS, and finally about Heroku (our host) not supporting HTTP/2 yet and thus being a bad platform for importmaps (unless you add a CDN). Fortunately, DHH's blog post about Rails' bundler journey was pretty enlightening on this front, but of course it took me a while to find it, and then I had to remember to double-check HTTP/2 support, which DHH took completely for granted.
For some reason every step in this learning journey is frustrating and confusing. Is there a learning resource that teaches you modern fundamental JS approaches AND puts them into context with older approaches, clearly also outlining which approaches are now deprecated and why?