Ask HN: How do I learn modern JavaScript?

[qz_]

I learned JavaScript in the days of of jQuery and W3Schools, and having taken a break from JavaScript since ES6 came out I feel lost whenever I see a snippet of modern JS these days. Does anyone have a suggestion for a good resource made for transitioning from ancient to modern JS? Thanks in advance!

[godot]

This might be grossly simplifying things: but if you're already familiar with "old JS" (since you mentioned jQuery), to read and write ES6 code in most modern JS projects, you really only need to get used to a handful of concepts: 1) lambda functions and the fat arrow syntax and what it does for scope, which is used extensively in modern JS codebases; 2) Promises/promise chains and async/awaits; 3) certain widely used new keywords like const and let, how requires and exports work in node.

This doesn't include frameworks like React which is its own entire separate category of things. But at least you'll be comfortable with ES6 and node8+ at this point. If you're more interested in frontend modern JS unfortunately you'll also probably have to learn about babel and webpack and the like.

[ideatostartup]

@qz_ Checkout Modern JavaScript Explained For Dinosaurs : https://medium.com/the-node-js-collection/modern-javascript-...

Also, here is a list of sources we recommend for learning JavaScript: https://github.com/ideatostartup/technologies#language

[shaunpersad]

I found these articles from the Mozilla blog to be very helpful: https://hacks.mozilla.org/category/es6-in-depth/

The articles are in reverse order, so you'll have to go to page 2 to get to the intro.

[andrewhayter]

PonyFoo has been putting out some solid books lately. You can read them free online.

https://ponyfoo.com/books

[pieterr]

I like these books from Alex Rauschmayer.

http://exploringjs.com

[pixelperfect]

javascript.info is a good comprehensive resource for learning modern JS

[Antoninus]

Read and Write lots it.