Ever since I moved to Vancouver (Canada) in last November, I was faced with the task of finding a job as a Front End developer. And according to Canadian job market, a front end developer should have some level of knowledge in MVC frameworks. The most famous of them all: AngularJS.
For the last 2 months, I had too much free time, so I decided to start working on improving my skills. The plan was to divide it into 2 phases:
Phase 1: JavaScript basics
As a "Multimedia Engineer" graduate, I didn't know much about JavaScript, and my work experience in the last 4 and a half years didn't help in improving it. So it was back to school for me.
Starting with a free workshop in JavaScript basics at Brainstation Vancouver, I found an online website which takes you through the needed basics in an interactive course: Hello Codecademy.
You can read about Codecademy details on their website, but their JavaScript course gives you what you need in order to have a base knowledge. When I finished it, I finally knew in some details what "Array, Function, Method, Class, Inheritance, Constructor, etc." are in JavaScript. So I decided to move to phase 2.
Phase 2: AngularJS
What is AngularJS? That's not exactly our subject here, but you can visit their official website and read everything about it.
AngularJS
Being a AngularJS virgin, and almost zero experience and knowledge in JavaScript, it was kind of a rough start for me. Once I finished the JavaScript basics course, I bought the "Pro" subscription in Codecademy and did all the tests and projects as a memory refresh.
Later, I started the AngularJS course. It was a rough start, but certainly worth it. In my last job, I observed Java developers wrestling with Dojo Toolkit to connect JSON and web services to the HTML interface while it was really easy to do the same task with AngularJS.
To be honest, Codecademy AngularJS' course is not for beginners, if you know nothing about Modules, Apps, and Containers, don't take that course. Plus, their "Pro" support is neither "Pro" or helpful.
Once I figured that out, I decided to cancel my subscription and switched to a course I bought from Udemy.
That course was (and still is) a life saver, giving you everything you need from the ground up. Knowing the basics and linking it to JavaScript basics in a visual and somehow technical helped me with the basics. I am not going to go into technical details, but from what I know so far, I am in love with AngularJS.
I can't proclaim myself as a good AngularJs developer (yet), but I will be publishing a demo app soon on my GitHub that showcases what I learnt from both courses as well as personal research.
Wish me luck :).