
Ask HN: What fundamentals does a veteran mobile/backend dev need for front end? - m_fayer
I have many years of .NET and Java (backend, Android, desktop) development under my belt. Over the last year I&#x27;ve had to do a lot of frontend development, first with Angular1 and now with VueJS. I&#x27;ve hit the ground running quite decently, using TypeScript&#x2F;SASS&#x2F;Webpack, and so on. I grok the languages, the DOM, HTML&#x2F;CSS, the frameworks, and my Google-foo seems to be serving me well.<p>But I&#x27;m uncomfortably aware that I&#x27;m missing some fundamentals, and am spending way too much time in trial-and-error land. I only have a fuzzy understanding of JS modules, module loading, and bundling. I don&#x27;t really get when and how the browser loads scripts. I don&#x27;t really understand the concurrency model of the Javascript VM. I&#x27;m somewhat confused by the tooling (NPM seems to be more than just a package manager, Why does Bower exist? Why would you use both Gulp AND Webpack?) And so on.<p>So, I&#x27;m looking for any and all pointers on which fundamentals I need, and the best resources (books, tutorials, online courses, whatever) for learning them, and of course I&#x27;m willing to spend money. The important thing is to find resources aimed at an experienced developer who did not come of age doing webdev.
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keefe
I did some front end work as a primarily back end guy - I've found that doing
some nodejs has helped my core javascript altogether. You have to let go of
your ideas about classical languages - but consider ES6, at least you get the
class keyword back. The concurrency model is that you have a single thread
with an event loop, which never interrupts segments, it waits for an asynch
call with a callback or for the function to end. So, your problem is event
loop cleanliness vs mutex management.

I would focus on one of the big view players - React or Angular, from facebook
and google. It seems like the old school jquery dom updates is out of fashion
now. I wouldn't worry about the toolset, it sucks - webpack I guess has some
uses.

I would focus on the core thing, e.g. React and javascript fundamentals.
Tooling and stuff will follow along once you get a job in it.

