Tyler Clark gives solid reasons to learn your JS fundamentals.
Tyler Clark explains how learning the fundamentals is important for getting the salary and title you want in interviews and writing solid, understandable code that carries over across frameworks.
Be sure to check out Tyler's egghead.io course Advanced JavaScript Foundations to get those JS skills on lock!
"Advanced JavaScript Foundations With Tyler Clark" Transcript
Taylor Bell: Hey Tyler, thanks so much for joining me today.
Tyler Clark: Hey, thanks for having me.
Taylor Bell: Yeah, so I wanted to ask you a few things about your new advanced JavaScript foundations course.
Tyler Clark: Yeah.
Taylor Bell: Why is it important to further one's knowledge of the foundations?
Tyler Clark: Yeah, that's a good question. I really like this course because... And I mentioned this somewhere in there, maybe I think it was in the intro video, but what I talk about in this course is not required for somebody to know these principles in order to make your first website at React or Angular or whatever framework you want to use. But what I've seen with these concepts is they're not things that are talked about too often. Mainly because people don't need to know them to get into web development, but what I have seen is they can sometimes be used against you when going up in interviews.
Tyler Clark: A lot of these questions, a lot of these concepts I teach in this course I've seen get asked in a Q&A of an interview, which can affect your salary range. It can even affect the title they give you, whether you're a senior, mid, just by simply answering some of these questions and disregarding if you know React or to build an app. But if you answer some of these questions wrong, I've seen it knock your title and your salary.
Tyler Clark: And then also there's some cases where if you get stuck in a debug mode where you get an error that's kind of complex and you don't really know why something's happening the way it is. Without understanding some of these fundamentals, it can be difficult and you don't even know what to Google in some cases to get the stack overflow answer. So debugging, interviewing, and then just overall code quality, right? Understanding how things work can help you write code and in a proper manner so that when people come in and see your code, they know what's going on because it's readable, they understand what's happening and it's able to translate across developers better.
Taylor Bell: Cool. And so when you were teaching the workshop, as you were developing this material, were there any kind of surprises that you had about questions people asked?
Tyler Clark: There were a few nuances that came up maybe about specific syntax or there were some questions like, "When would I ever do this?" Or, "Why would ever do this?" And again, a lot of these things that I talk about are things that people sometimes avoid because they don't know them. And so there wasn't really any questions that were asked to me that really jumped out like, "Oh, why would you ask that?" Mainly because people don't really think about these things too often. They just write it and move on. So a lot of the questions about this course kind of stemmed from where and why would I use these things and how does that work now that I use it in React. That kind of stuff.
Taylor Bell: Cool. And so what's kind of the general flow of how the course goes?
Tyler Clark: A lot of this stuff, we're not building an application. We're not building a user interface where someone can click around with. This course mainly is just one off bullet point concepts to JavaScript. So they're not entirely related to each other. Some of these things go hand in hand like prototypes and this and classes, they're all kind of related, right? It's all JavaScript. But most of these concepts are one off things. From the beginning to the end I assume that you know basic JavaScript knowledge. You don't need to watch the course all in order. It'll be best if you watch it in order, but it's mainly just me typing in a terminal into my IDE, sorry. And just explaining what each syntax does and how they relate.
Taylor Bell: Cool. And so after somebody takes this course, what should they do next? What's a good stepping stone from here?
Tyler Clark: From here, another course on egghead about prototypes that dive a bit more into prototypes and prototype inheritance. There are some other egghead courses on this keyword. There's some on variables. So I think that the next step would be to actually dive deeper on each individual topic. I merely scratch the surface on a lot of these things. Some of them are a little more straightforward, but classes, even with the this keyword, I hit a lot of use cases, but there still is a good amount more. So I think the next step would be is diving deeper on each individual concept. Because like I said, there's a lot more that goes on in these.
Taylor Bell: Cool. Well thanks so much for meeting today to talk a little bit about your course and I'm excited to check it out.
Tyler Clark: Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having me.