Stack Overflow has unintentionally become the go-to source for copy-pasting bad example code from JavaScript’s darker recesses. Vaidehi Joshi’s basecs project features illustrated guides to a growing list of algorithms, and was recently turned into a podcast. Grokking Algorithms is surprisingly comprehensive, but if you find algorithms as fun as my mentees have, you’ll quickly run out. Better yet, you can code it up with a Test Driven Development (TDD) approach: write tests first, then code up the solution to make the tests pass! Here’s an excellent introduction to TDD from the folks at dwyl. Instead, I recommend scribbling on a whiteboard and pulling up a text editor to implement the algorithm as you read. The easy-to-follow explanations and colorful illustrations have made it a favorite with my students and mentees. Grokking Algorithms is a delightfully unpretentious introduction to hallmark algorithms in Computer Science.

It’s unlikely you’ll learn CS basics in a coding bootcamp, but you don’t need to sacrifice four years of your life and $150k on a degree! While you don’t need a CS degree to be a great developer, a grounding in Computer Science can foster a love of clever problem solving and design patterns to help you write smarter code. More individuals than ever are joining the developer workforce from a background outside of Computer Science. You’ll be a shoe-in for React and Elm projects. The free JavaScript Allongé eBook is a fun and elegant way to learn the essential concepts of Functional Programming from a JavaScript perspective. JavaScript is foremost a functional language, so you can stand out from the crowd of junior developers and improve your problem solving skills with an FP primer. Yet very few developers understand the basics of Functional Programming beyond the. Thanks to frameworks like React and Elm, Functional Programming (FP) has made a huge resurgence in the development community. Keep in mind that these books won’t teach you to code, so they’re not substitutes for an online course or a coding bootcamp-but they are excellent supplements! 1. Here are five books you should read as you begin your journey as a web developer. Programming literature may not be as engaging as Codecademy or CodeCombat, but it will help reinforce concepts and provide perspectives you’d be hard pressed to find in an online course. This post originally appeared as a guest blog on Course Report.Īh, books-the time-tested technique for ingesting knowledge.

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