Opinions on LearnYouNode?

1

Anyone who has completed the learnyounode tutorial part of the FCC curriculum have any thoughts on it?

I found the explanation of what Node is to be completely missing. The directions were very difficult to follow to the point that I often didn’t even know what it was asking me to do.

I know a lot of this is just an extreme lack of experience with Node, so I don’t know the lingo yet and so when they list out a lot of terminology I felt very lost. Honestly, I found myself second guessing everything I did in learnyounode because the verbiage of the instructions was so dense/opaque.

I’m gonna go off and find a better resource for Node and work through it, then come back and redo these learnyounode challenges. I feel like I’ll be more successful.

2

I really struggled with learnyounode, and even when I completed the challenges, I had no idea what I was doing.

I watched a bunch of YouTube videos, including some Microsoft training vids that were HOURS long, and that helped…

Now that I’m comfortable with it, it’s actually dead easy to use. The Express API docs are pretty great: http://expressjs.com/en/4x/api.html

The main things to be aware of are:

  • How to set up a server on a particular port;
  • How to define routes;
  • How to work with parameters and query strings in routes;
  • How to export your own modules to use throughout the app (like your models, scripts, routes etc);
  • How to use middleware (which feels really technical, and is always explained in the context of the event loop and other scary sounding things - when it really just means a bit of code that you jam into all the requests that modifies it in some way, or passes values along…)
  • Eventually, figure out the Async nature of JavaScript in Node - that is, eventually, you’re going to start getting ‘undefined’ bits of data that you know should be some data from your database, or something you read from a file. Google it when you get to it - anything discussing ‘buffer’ or ‘cursor’ will help at that point.

If you have specific questions along the way, just ping me and I’ll try and help :slight_smile:

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3

It sucks as a tutorial :expressionless: It is better to use some other source to learn Node.js and Express.js and then do learnyounode as a test to check your knowledge.

Same with learnyoumongo.

I would recommend you the book “Express.js in Action” by Evan Hahn - hands down the best tutorial to Node and Express.

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5

I would agree wholeheartedly that learnyounode is a really poor teaching tool for beginners, particularly in the last exercises 'Finish working with NodeJS servers". I felt like I was merely stumbling upon the answers rather than actually understanding how things worked. The most helpful documents I found have actually came from NodeJS.org themselves e.g Understanding what goes on under the hood in an HTTP server is explained quite comprehensively here:

https://nodejs.org/en/docs/guides/anatomy-of-an-http-transaction/

I would recommend this guide before attempting the problems to save you hours of trawling through the docs and testing everything that looks remotely plausible! :slight_smile:

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