I have been going through the FCC Front End Certification for a couple months now and I am currently completing the Intermediate Algorithms and I am a little more than halfway finished with completing them. Would it be wise to begin learning Node.js before finishing the front end curriculum?
No not at all dudeā¦ You will miss out most important things may be ā¦You should complete first front end and then switch on to back end technologies.
I used NodeJS and npm for my TicTacToe project, and will most likely use it for my Simon game as well.
I donāt think node is that important for algorithm scripting, but if you want to add libraries to your websites when you start with the advanced projects, itās really useful.
At what point were you at in the Front End curriculum when you started learning Node.js?
If you feel that you understand the material of the FE cert, then youāll be fine.
But be aware that you will need some basic HTML, CSS, and some pretty good JS chops.
I started ālearningā NodeJS (there really isnāt much to learn for what Iām doing with NJS/npm) after my pomodoro timer.
I used this resource that basically explained modern front end web development, very useful:
As well as this software-dev roadmap:
Node is really just a javascript environment that doesnāt need the browser. If you install node, you should be able to take one of your existing programs and run it right away ānode myprogram.jsā. Itās that simple.
The only difference is that node doesnāt give you a window or a document object, so code that relies on them wonāt work. But anything that just has variables, functions etc. and writes output to the console (probably most of your algorithm solutions?) will just work.
NPM - the node package manager - is something new to learn, but itās just a system for installing āmodulesā alongside your code so that you can use them.
Thatās how people use Node to build much more complicated things - they install modules and ārequireā them into their code to use as building blocks.
In my opinion, itās useful to know at least a bit about NPM before you learn React on the front end.
edit to add: you should also check out ānodemonā - if you do ānodemon myprogram.jsā, instead of just running your code once it re-runs it every time you save a change - makes for a much quicker feedback loop when youāre solving algorithm problems.
2 Likes