Why Study JavaScript?
JavaScript is one of the 3 languages all web developers must learn:
1. HTML to define the content of web pages
2. CSS to specify the layout of web pages
3. JavaScript to program the behavior of web pages
Web pages are not the only place where JavaScript is used. Many desktop and server programs use JavaScript. Node.js is the best known. Some databases, like MongoDB and CouchDB, also use JavaScript as their programming language
Beginner Friendliness
Easy to Pick Up
JavaScript is somewhat easy to get started with as it is a higher level language, which means JavaScript abstracts away most of the complex details of the machine so you can focus on learning how to program. What's more, you can get started with coding JavaScript straight from your browser without setting up any development environment, which is a reason many beginners seem to like it.
Fun
JavaScript is mainly used for frontend development, and there are various tools that will allow you to quickly get a working prototype with JavaScript. Nonetheless, you should first focus on obtaining a solid understanding of JavaScript before you explore what the community has to offer.
Complex
Although all browsers implement JavaScript, the same code doesn't necessarily behaves the same way in different browser environments, so trying to figure out why your code works in Chrome but not in Firefox may sometimes be frustrating. Additionally, beginners may quickly find it difficult to grasp the concepts of how JavaScript works, and the language has several designs that make it easy for beginners to shoot themselves in the foot. Finding an experienced JavaScript mentor will likely help you stay on the right track and ease your learning process.
Scalability
Not Fast
As a dynamically untyped language, JavaScript is slow because it is too flexible and the machine would need to do a lot of referencing to make sure what the definition of something is, and this slows JavaScript performance down. The speed of front-end JavaScript will depend on the framework.
Nonetheless, the Node.js environment sped JavaScript up, and much of the Node.js community focuses on performance to capitalize on JavaScript's potential for backend programming as well.
Difficult to Maintain
Because JavaScript is a dynamically untyped language, the same thing can easily mean something different depending on the context and it also lacks support for classes, making JavaScript harder to debug than most languages.
As a JavaScript app grows larger and more complex, it may be hard to maintain as errors will become difficult to track down and fix. It will take experience and insight to know how to design your code or write unit tests to ease maintainability, but you can learn how to design code better by working with an experienced JavaScript mentor.
In addition, Microsoft's open-sourced TypeScript (a statically-typed version of JavaScript) is a potential solution to help ease the scalability problems.
Community
Community size is important, because the larger a programming language community is, the more support you'd be likely to get. As you step into the programming world, you'll soon understand how vital support is, as the developer community is all about giving and receiving help. Moreover, the larger a community, the more people will be building useful tools to make development in that particular language easier. As of now, there are over 600 notable programming languages world-wide.
So, with that context in mind, let's get into the details of the JavaScript community size.
Largest StackOverflow Community
StackOverflow is a programming Q&A site you will no doubt become intimate with as a coding beginner. JavaScript has overtaken Java in terms of community size, and it will likely keep growing.
Largest Meetup Community in Terms of Programming Language
At meetups, you can generally network and learn from fellow developers. Meetups often offer mentorship to those who want it as well. There are 3600+ JavaScript Meetup groups, totaling 1.48 million members worldwide.
Needless to say, JavaScript has a huge community, which as a whole has a lot of energy and may help you stay motivated with learning JavaScript.
Most-tagged language at GitHub
One of the things JavaScript developers like about JavaScript the most is the community. JavaScript constantly innovates new, nifty tools, which may be very exciting and fun. There are over 3100 GitHub projects with over 500 stars. However, many tools also have a high churn rate, so keeping up with all the new things may be slightly exhausting.
Career Opportunities
With more and more businesses moving online, demand for JavaScript developers has been rocketing. JavaScript is also the most demanded programming skill at Angel List.
If you want to use JavaScript for backend development, the average salary in the US for Node.js developers is about $98,962
Future
The web browser is one of the most used applications on both desktop and mobile devices. With more and more services moving to the web, JavaScript will only increase in popularity, and as a whole there is a lot of technical innovation going in on JavaScript. Many developers and businesses have used JavaScript to extend their web products outside of the browser, which means JavaScript can be used build simple desktop and mobile apps.
JavaScript is the #8 most popular language on TIOBE index
A programming language's ability to stay relevant and survive also depends on whether the language is getting new blood.
Interest in learning JavaScript grew by 22.3% in 2015
Considering how many services are going online, clearly JavaScript will continue to grow quickly and stay very relevant in the years to come. To start learning this language, there are many JavaScript courses and tutorials to choose from.
In general, it's difficult to predict where JavaScript's direction would be as the technology is always evolving, but needless to say, JavaScript will only continue to grow in terms of adoption rate
There is no doubt that JavaScript is the most popular programming language at this moment, and it's also confirmed by StackOverFlow's Survey. You can build static websites, web applications, native mobile applications (yes, you can do that too), desktop applications, and even server-side applications in JavaScript. It also makes you a hundred times more employer as there are tons of web development jobs out there. Because of that, ore and more developers are learning JavaScript to become a web developer.
Another reason for learning JavaScript is that it powers some of the most popular and powerful web development frameworks, e.g. Angular, React, Node JS, and jQuery. To use those tools and frameworks, good knowledge of JavaScript is required. So that you can understand what's going on underneath.
Now that we know how vital JavaScript is and why you should learn it let me share some of the best online courses you can take to start your JavaScript journey and eventually become master of it.
I was a big fan of books, and In the past, even share some of my favorite JavaScript books, but from last a couple of years, I found online training courses best to learn a new technology or programming language.
The main reason is active learning, while learning from a book is still high, sometime you may feel bored and stuck while trying to do things but with online courses, you can see how exactly it's done.
I have also found that Instructors are also more reachable than authors of popular books, another reason I am suggesting developers start with courses first and then read books to get a more comprehensive knowledge.
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