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Comment by misnome | Hacker News Reader

It looks like an interesting light summary of the state of things. The technical articles might be more useful, for me.

As a primarily Python/C++ developer who dabbled with JS in the early and late 2000s, can anyone recommend an efficient way to get started with modern JS development for hints like interactive frontends with a different-language. I’m comfortable with large language ecosystems, but there seems to be an intimidating number of incompatible paradigms - and there’s both the technology and toolings.

Easiest to start with one track e.g. react/tutorials and branch from there? Good books that approach the problem efficiently and for a decent existing programmer/scientist?

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I'm the original author of the post. A friend who reviewed a draft of it asked me the same question. I had the following recommendations:

1. Solid recorded talk (on YouTube) on using npm run-script to automate local builds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RYETb9YVrk

2. Modern JavaScript Explained for Dinosaurs: https://medium.com/the-node-js-collection/modern-javascript-... -- this is a long post that goes into technical depth on the stuff that I covered at a high level in my post

3. Webpack -- The Confusing Parts: https://medium.com/@rajaraodv/webpack-the-confusing-parts-58... -- long post that goes into depth on Webpack, in particular.

Aside from all of these, the book I have found the most helpful if you want to zoom straight ahead to React is "Road to React": https://leanpub.com/the-road-to-learn-react

It's 200 pages, oriented around real code, and straightforward.

A good high level overview of the moving parts involved in front end dev is https://roadmap.sh/frontend. Not all of it is used all the time, but if you can talk intelligently about many of the parts you are doing fine.

My recommendation to people learning specific frameworks such as react is to start with vanilla react (their doc's are quite good). Then, after building a small app that solves a problem for yourself, you'll start realising when you have bugs and other maintainability issues related to state management. At that point, it is worthwhile looking into redux (or another state management library). Otherwise if you go straight to react + redux it can just feel like a lot of boilerplate for no reason.

Same with TypeScript. I think type safety offers a huge reduction in the number of bugs in large systems. But it isn't required when first learning react.

I had the same problem as you.

I also highly recommend "Modern JavaScript Explained for Dinosaurs" for a high level overview of why the JS tooling is like it is.

This is also a good overview of the whole ecosystem, together with suggested learning paths:

https://frontendmasters.com/books/front-end-handbook/2019/

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