Recently, I bought a book on Node.JS due to hearing it 1000000 times. Truthfully, I wasn’t so excited because I didn’t quite get the benefit but I bought it since my company gave $200 book expenses. After reading about 2 chapters, I gave up. I gave up because I felt like relearning the stuff I knew from another technology (Java). If I didn’t know Java, I think I would’ve continued reading the books. Since I knew, I kept asking advanced questions like
That’s nice but how do add http filters to your server? such as security filters that checks the user is admin/user/etc…
That’s nice but how do you set the http header?
How do you set HTTPS?
Since I’ve done Java for past 15 years, those answers are like 'ABC’s that I don’t even need to think how… I just know the answer. As a paid developer, I like to be specialized in particular sets of technologies but I feel that I’m just too bias to even consider another technology to learn. I don’t mean that one technology is better than other but it feels like ToMAto VS Tomato… I already know how to run/walk/jump but is it any beneficial to learn again? Anyways, I’ve decided to ‘force’ myself to learn Node.JS to see if I can break this habit of being ‘bias’. Do you guys think I’m being crazy? Just wanted to hear some opinions on this matter.
Crazy? No. Planning for the future in a smart way? Most likely.
I’m way biased, myself. I’ve been working with ColdFusion (and SQL Server, and Oracle Server) since 2000, and I absolutely LOVE ColdFusion (although I hate Adobe… go figure.)
I’ve recently gotten to a point where I realise that I do need to start learning a new dev language. But when I tried to sign up for classes at the nearest community college, their night courses started before I could be home from work in time to attend. So, here I sit, knowing that I need to advance to keep myself employable, and I’m not willing to leave work early three days a week in order to do it (the hours have to be made up on the remaining two days… or I use PTO… that ain’t happening.)
I’m not sure if I’m doing it to plan for the future. I can certainly say that I DO NOT want to use Javascript for back-end coding and I’m pretty sure it won’t bring in more money as well. I’m purely doing it to ‘break’ my habit of being bias. Seriously, it takes tremendous will power to learn… In my head, I can hear talking to myself
“Why are you learning this? You already know how to do this”
“You don’t even like JavaScript so why are you learning it even more?”
“This author thinks Node.JS is a revolutionary tool where I know it’s not…”
It’s really these questions that bother me as a developer than learning Node.JS. As a developer, should’nt I always strive to learn new stuff? What is the true nature of this ‘resistance’ of not learning Node.JS? Is it me being lazy? Is it me being less professional by not caring about new technology? Since I consider myself as ‘professional’ developer, I just wanted to test myself that I can teach myself a new technology that I don’t really like.
I’m purely doing it to ‘break’ my habit of being bias
I think that’s awesome. If it turns out useful - great! It’s a marketable skill, at any rate.
But when I tried to sign up for classes at the nearest community college, their night courses started before I could be home from work in time to attend.
For whatever my opinion is worth, you’d be better off finding a well reviewed YouTube course or a class at Learnable than you would a class at any college, much less a community college, much less an online class from a college - unless you know for a fact that they’re good there. Most colleges seem to teach outdated stuff with outdated tools, and you have to pay a ton and go to a classroom, when you could get a book and some videos and do it yourself for cheaper and on your own time…
I’m ADHD (among other things), and the structured environment of a teacher-led instruction course is precisely what I need in order to learn. I’ve tried self-learning, and it does eventually get me to where I want to go, but it is a long, tedious and painstaking process.
You don’t learn to walk again every time you buy a new pair of shoes, do you?
Build something with Node.js Express and go back and read a book to get a deeper understanding of it later. Want to learn how to create a 500 response header? Just look that up. Want to learn how to return an xml response? Look that up. Want to switch from EJS to Jade? … look it up. There’s no reason to learn from a book made for people who don’t know what they are doing.
I’ve grown to like Node.js Express quite a bit. It was a little odd at first, but really not that bad at all since it doesn’t follow odd patterns, like some stacks, and I already know JS. I had a harder time picking up Play than I did Express.
I’m ADHD (among other things), and the structured environment of a teacher-led instruction course is precisely what I need in order to learn.
That’s interesting, I have the opposite experience - I’ve found that when forced into a classroom setting is when I am least receptive to learning. I tend to check out and do a million other things in my mind. If I steer myself onto the subject in a more engaging way (i.e. @mawburns’ “build something”) then it usually works better for me.
Being in a physical classroom does nothing for me. I prefer to follow online tutorials like codecademy.com
It allows me to go at my own pace, and I can have a little desktop sketch pad and write down all of the things I know I will remember, and those that I need to study later.
Then I’ll run through at a later time and go over my sketches and make sure I did remember that fact.
I dunno, it works for me. Following this approach I’ve never had an issue with the willingness to learn something new. The fact that it’s an industry requirement almost, gives me motivation to learn something new.
It does kinda suck when you are a beginner and you are stressed from code not working as you expect, but debugging code is extremely fun for me so it’s a win win.
I’ve tried that as well and just left me with more frustration… Obviously, I did find the solution on what I needed but the development was on a path to a duck tape solution…
Since Node is actually based on JavaScript which is a totally different language from Java the similarities to Java are entirely superficial. Knowing Java would almost make it harder to learn Node as the superficial similarity would keep confusing you eah time you encounter one of the many differences.
Well it sounds like you’re trying to create websites with it. Using vanilla Node.js would be like doing it with strictly Java Servlets… which, by your own suggestion in the past, is not the way to go and you should at least be using a web framework like Spring or JSF.
Like Java, Node.js is just something that runs on the server and you can make work handle http requests if you want to. Using a framework like Express or Spring (Java) just makes sense to avoid needless boilerplating and reinventing the wheel every time you turn around. Node is probably more like Java than it’s like PHP.
That makes sense… so that’s what I was doing… re-learning Java Servlets. It certainly feels that way. The site I was trying to build is really stupid and dumb. Mostly, it deal with Youtube API but I haven’t gone even to that point. I have learned other tech like Ruby on Rails… it was much easier to learn than now.
