Homework Week 9

Introduction

This week, we rounded up all the material that we have covered so far in the course, and touched on a few other areas that you could start to work on to take your programming to the next level.

Congratulations for getting to this point!! Although you might not feel it right now, you now have some solid exposure to a wide range of programming concepts, which will be of great use going forward.

Rather than the usual project-based homework, this week I’ll be introducing a range of resources that will be helpful to build on what you learned in this course.

All the material is bonus material for this week!

Reading

These resources all relate to blind spots that we still have after course. These are all free resources, and most of them are crash courses on different technologies.

Courses

The following are all good options for taking a deeper dive into the world of programming. You should be prepared enough for each of these based on what you learned already in this course.

Modern React with Redux | Stephen Grider (Udemy) | 52 hours

This is the course where I first learned React. The concepts are all clearly explained, and Stephen Grider walks you through a range of interesting projects as the material gets fleshed out in more detail.

The material that I glossed over in 2 hours is explained at a slower pace and in more detail, and it’s also great for picking up how modern ES6 JavaScript syntax looks.

This course is a great first step to feel more comfortable with how React works, and give you some inspiration for how to make a complete frontend by yourself.

(Link here)

CS50 - Introduction to Computer Science | Harvard University (edX) | ~150 hours

This is a broad class on Computer Science, introducing a wide range of material. CS50 starts out programming in C, which is much more difficult to work with, compared to the JavaScript that we have been writing. There will be a fair amount of overlap between some of the concepts that we touched on in this course, but you’ll also learn a lot more about how programming languages work under the hood.

For most people, I wouldn’t recommend taking CS50, since it won’t improve your practical skills all that much. If you want to become a serious backend developer, then it might be helpful, but otherwise you’ll spend a lot of time working on stuff that doesn’t directly improve your programming skills.

Taking this course without a tutor who knows the material may also be difficult, as the projects make you do lots of frustrating work by yourself to figure it out on your own.

(Link here)

Mastering Data Visualization in D3.js | Adam Janes (Udemy) | 7 hours

As a totally shameless plug, I will also recommend my own course on D3.js, which offers something a little different. D3 is a data visualization library for making interactive data visualizations with JavaScript. It involves moving shapes around on the screen, and associating those shapes with pieces of data. You can pretty much make anything graphically that you can imagine with D3, as it’s a pretty powerful library.

It won’t be that useful day-to-day, since for just including a simple bar/line chart, you’re probably better off using something like Plotly, which provides pre-built charts (which are made with D3), which will be a lot quicker than making them yourself.

(Link here)