Want to Learn Node? Wes Bos Review!

Heard of Wes Bos? He’s just dropped the best way to learn server-side JavaScript! course today! This is my review.

As always he releases these in two packages. A Starter Course which is about half of it and the Master Course. I just finished what you would get in the Starter Course, but do yourself a favor and just buy Master Course for extra 10 bucks like I did and level up.

I’ve already built my own node/express/mongodb project from scratch so did I really need to learn node again? Well, I learned how to use destructuring from a controller. A solid way of structuring a MVC application for express. Oh, async and await for things that return promises. Yea, there is a lot of cool goodies here.

What audience is this for?

  • You know how to select, and manipulate stuff with JavaScript.
  • You know what a callback function is.
  • You have done at least the intermediate waypoints here on FCC.

Working with express right now? Cool. Me too. Even as an intermediate node/express developer did what I learn?

  • .pug templates! I never thought to touch anything other than EJS before this. I’ve taken The Web Developer Bootcamp from Colt Steel and that’s what he’s taught. It was comfortable. However; if you know HTML enough pug/jade is awesome. It looks scary at first but Wes does an amazing job making sure you understand it.

  • How to use google maps api, and put markers on a map. Really easy. I even learned about mongodb compass which is beautiful.

  • I’ve really solidified my understanding of middleware. When I built GiftCashing I had to upload avatars, and at that time I struggled with what to do with the image once I have it in memory. The way that we do it here is uploading with multer, and resizing it with jimp.

  • On our stores model in this course we created a new mongoose method with aggregation! Yes, you can do that.

    storeSchema.statics.getTagsList = function() {
    return this.aggregate([
    { $unwind: ‘$tags’ },
    { $group: { _id: ‘$tags’, count: { $sum: 1 } }},
    { $sort: { count: -1 }}
    ]);
    }
    So this is a really cool piece of code right here. Basically I’m taking the result and duplicating everything by our model property tags. So if a document has 3 tags, it will expose that record three times with each unique tag name. Than you group them and add a virtual properly count… and sum it. Than you sort from high to low and in our controller we have something that looks like this:

    exports.getStoresByTag = async (req, res, next) => {
    const tag = req.params.tag;
    const tagQuery = tag || { $exists: true };
    const tagsPromise = Store.getTagsList();
    const storesPromise = Store.find({ tags: tagQuery });
    const [tags, stores] = await Promise.all([tagsPromise, storesPromise]);

    res.render('tag', { tags, title: 'Tags', tag, stores });
    

    }

You may ask yourself. Where is the error handling? What’s this async and await Promise.all()? Did I mention This. Course. Is Awesome!! lol.

If you’re starting to get comfortable with JavaScript, and you want to jump to backend development. You will thank me later. I really feel like this course has already leveled up my express skills, I cannot wait to finish it.

Conclusion:

Wes, has done an amazing job, and I’ve already learned a lot. I’ll update this post when I finish everything, but if you know node/express or not. You will learn a lot here.

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oh nice, Node ws on my todo list… i’ll check it out.

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thanks for this post @imcodingideas !

i was about to ask about it when i read ur post. I have one question for you / others:

did wes bos now change from “typing in a bunch of code and throwing css” to “explaining things so we learn” ?

hope to read from you.

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So the css is really already written. This is not to teach you css. The way that he does this is really from a route that says: it works to how to pull in the navigation. Than he explains to you whats going on. Than he goes and explains how to do each step. So once you understand how to do these core concepts… you start to move.

He’s not just putting code on the screen. He’s explaining to you. Not too fast… at a good pace. I really enjoy it!

sounds good! thx. i think im gonna follow do the course

also, can you post the discount-code here? we’re all students :slight_smile:

I just started this today. So far so good…however I did Colt Steele’s course first…if I hadn’t done it and got familiar with node I am not sure I would be picking up everything in the course as fast.

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use ‘STUDENT’ code without quote, to get $15 off for students. You can use this same code on every course by Wes Bos.

What about his other courses? Are they as good as this one? What about this course https://javascript30.com/ ? :slight_smile:

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Yes, they are as good. He’s an amazing teacher. Even as a ExpressJS Developer I learned a lot from him. Really, I cannot recommend it enough!

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I want to learn but can’t pay :frowning:

@samundrak just use torrents or other free resources for learning. I can’t see any problem here.

Are you guys really rating the course with 1 and 2 star reviews when you haven’t even taken it? Just because you can’t take a course isn’t a reason to rate it bad :expressionless: You can just uncheck add a rating at the top if you want to leave a comment not a review.

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guys does anyone have a torrent link for wes bos node course.
I couldn’t find one.

1 Like