What
The course is about learning the new features available in JavaScript (it has been available for quite a while) from ES6 and more. Check the features of ES6 and beyond.
Where
The course can be purchased from www.es6.io. You just need a good Visual Studio Code or your favorite code editor.
Who
The course is taught by Wes Bos (checkout his website), a canadian developer and teacher. He has created many many courses about JavaScript that thousand of students have taken.
He is very engaging when he teaches and that is something that keeps you interested during the entire course.
The Good
It covers almost all of the features of ES6 (what about Internationalization & Localization? Maybe it wasn’t available as part of ES6 at the time… ask Wes!).
Despite some of the lessons missing more concrete use cases, the majority of the lessons were full of good examples. Wes provides the starter files and the solution. But have a go, challenge yourself and try to code it yourself.
In my case, I really went into the details of the Promises, ES6 Tooling and Async+Await lessons.
Also, the slack community was super great! I had to ask a couple of questions and wow, Wes has someone that looks like is dedicated to the courses and he answers very quickly. Thanks A-J Roos!
The Bad
Nothing really blocking. Read on to the missing bits to know more.
The Missing bits
The course is old (released in 2017) and would need a little update, especially in lesson 13 where we learn to use webpack and babel. Maybe a course could be built about that…
It might need a refresher, especially to help the people who are really new to npm. Or an advice would be to practice npm.
What I did is stick to the exact same npm package versions that Wes used so that I would get the same result.
If you follow along, you will find out that installing the latest packages will not work since the courses doesn’t cover the breaking change in the webpack and babel packages.
No matter what, the community is there to help.
Also, there are exercises and they are good but the course would be really great if the student could have a clear understanding of use cases to use such or such features.
Maybe a small project with, for each stage, a focus on each feature studied would have been a great way to practice the feature. That’s what is done in the Responsive Web Design Bootcamp course over at Scrimba.
Summary
Going through the entire course took me 15 hours.
I had taken the “Mobile Web Specialist” nanodegree at Udacity where I learned mainly the service worker technology and the prerequisite was to learn about ES6 before diving into the more complex PWA topic.
You can read my courses notes on the dedicated repository. Thanks Wes for creating this course and many others. I have purchased quite a few of his courses.
Next stop: the JavaScript30 course that might just be the course to fill the whole of the missing bits. Stay tuned!
