Learn Front-end and Back-end at the same time?

1

TLDR
If you had just four months to learn to code, would you focus on learning front end or learn both front-end and back-end at the same time?

Just a little but of context, I am an undergraduate engineering student who has the term (September to December) off. I have been going through the FCC front end certificate and i have been treating it like a job. I essentially try to spend at least 6 hours a day teaching myself to code. It has been a fun journey and my coding skills have grown exponentially since!

However, the nature of my program means that i will be either studying in school or at a co-op job, i won’t get another opportunity like this, where i have an entire day to teach my self code. Which means I have until the end of December to learn anything i want to learn. Of course i want to make the most of it.

I have just finished the wikipedia project, and starting to feel pretty comfortable with front end rudiments. My question is, should I aim to complete the Front end Certificate and focus on learning front end frameworks, to hopefully specialize in front end. Or should i work on the back end certificate at the same time so i can also get a foundation on that?

What do you guys think and why?

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If you’ve finished the Wikipedia project you’re definitely ready to work on the back end, since really you’ll just be building a REST API to make API calls to. Using Node and Express, you won’t even have to pick up a different language.

The fastest route I can recommend is to pick up the book “Express in Action.” That will get you up and running in a matter of days. From there, I’d start working on a legit full stack project. Something like a chat program or an eCommerce site or a social media site.

It’s a quick read, and worth its weight in gold: https://www.amazon.com/Express-Action-Writing-building-applications/dp/1617292427

Try to finish your full stack project by November, and then in December, work on either React or Angular 2. That’s web development really. Front end basics + a front end framework + a backend language and framework + a database.

Good luck!

4

Should edX course on full stack JavaScript come first?
Because there was something like this below when I took look at it.

Prerequisites

Please note that this is an advanced course with the following prerequisites:
Experience writing front- and back-end software
Basic knowledge of web application architecture
Knowledge of JavaScript fundamentals, including callbacks
Experience working with SQL or NoSQL databases