After the last interviews, it is clear that I need to code more and turn back to the basics. It seems that I have misinterpreted some of the basic notions of this keyword and scope related question so I decided to code some more.
To achieve that I decided to build from 0 a new app but I don’t know if I should use js libraries or frameworks or not.
What should I do?
this and scope can be pretty difficult concepts to really get a grasp of. i still struggle with them sometimes. i would suggest getting to a point where you’re confident in vanilla JS, and then delving into frameworks/libraries from there, that you think are beneficial to your coding. i learned jQuery before i really learned vanilla JS, and that was a mistake.
To my mind, this is the important distinction: if you had to do it without X library, could you? If you were put on a project that used Y framework, could you come up to speed on it quickly?
Real life personal example time.
In my last job we used jQuery and no popular frameworks. I got used to using jQuery for DOM manipulation. When I was given a coding and/or whiteboard question in interviews I would be honest with something like “I think the syntax for doing this in VanillaJS is something like this… I know you can do it, and the details would be easy to find.” or “I’ve read about how React and Angular would make this so much nicer, but I haven’t dug into the interpretation so here it is Old School.”
Yes, I am sure I could do it because I have done it before but should I do it? Should I use a framework? Will help me more to make the app in React or should I struggle with vanilla js?
Pursue your interests. Do the thing your interested in. You’ll do better on your personal project in this context and your interviews will go so much better because that passion and curiosity and enjoyment will shine through.
You answered your own question in your first sentence: “…turn back to the basics”.
Frameworks and libraries are not basics. Learn the basics thoroughly. Frameworks and libraries come and go.
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Adding on top of what @Soupedenuit said, and with reference to your first post, building an app from scratch doesn’t seem to be helpful if you are struggling with the basics—reading through YDKJS may be more helpful if you need a solid understand of the basics.
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Thank you for YDKJS - great resource. I think this is what I was looking for. I am not quite a newbie I do mostly Backend development for several years and I use jQuery with JavaScript often but I never bothered too much about basics and I was surprised to discover on the interview quiz many questions that seem basic but I did not know to answer.
I see! In that case you may enjoy reading YDKJS. It’s been on my to-do list for more than half a year and I’ve only decided to read it recently (after learning to code for a bit less than a year) and, admittedly, I was tossing between making something new and shiny and fun to learn more or reading YDKJS. I’m glad that I decided to do the latter and, suffice to say, there were a lot of ah-ha moments! I hope that will do the same for you, too!
Good luck! 