A Little Bit Easier with Each Step…
I MADE IT!
I have just submitted my last project for Flatiron School! The headaches and the triumphs!!! But I made it with a few programming languages under my belt.
We first started the Software Engineering program learning procedural and object-oriented Ruby. Next up, Sinatra. From there, Rails followed by Javascript. Lastly, React. And to think where I started, I only knew very basic HTML/CSS. I’ve come a long way…
As I look back at this journey through web development, even though each phase was hard, each programming language made the previous one we learned easier. That was done by design. Learn the fundamentals and then let’s learn something that will make it a bit easier to do. For example, React is a Javascript library that facilitates in building more simple and faster UI and UE’s. We learned the fundamentals of Javascript and it was followed with a library to make things a bit easier to function.
There were several reasons why React is beneficial to learn. React is maintained by Facebook. I don’t think I need to explain why this is one of the top reasons.
React is very developer friendly when it comes to usability. Even with a basic knowledge of JavaScript, React’s framework presents with code that is easier to read and write. React is a declarative language, unlike vanilla Javascript. We can design React to execute tasks but not have to code each step. React will figure it out on its own once it know what we want to accomplish.
Above, you can see creation of a Div and a Button. Both elements were created, textContent added to the elements, and placing those elements on the document. With vanilla Javascript, we have explicitly tell Javascript what we want, where we want it, and how we want. Basically, a lot of tedious tasks and repetitive codes.
With React, we’re using JSX to render what we want on the document without step by step instructions. We don’t have to tell React exactly how to create the elements and where to put them. React does the work behind the scenes to render our code. This way is more efficient and faster to write in comparison to vanilla Javascript.
What I’ve learned overall is to keep learning! Each programming language prepares us for the next and may make it a bit easier to grasp! An arsenal with multiple options gives us a better chance at solving the problem efficiently and possibly in more than one way!
