JavaScript 30 Review

JavaScript 30 is a free online video course teaching you the fundamentals of JavaScript in the browser.

The instructor is Wes Bos, a developer and educator who has been putting out top quality video courses for a while now.

I wanted to review the course because whilst it is free in the sense that you don’t pay any money, it is a time investment and time is money, yadda, yadda.

My History with JS and JS30

I have been working with JavaScript for several years and have a handful of production projects in the wild making money for folk that rely heavily on JavaScript in both the front and backend.

I wanted to watch these videos as a refresher on some things I maybe haven’t had to do in a while, and also to see current best practice. Whilst I use JavaScript a lot I don’t keep super up to date with the new hotness.

I mention this so you have a reference point for my review.

I also want to point out that I have no affiliation with Wes and he doesn’t know anything about this review.

JavaScript 30 Review

I loved this course. I learned a tonne of stuff (covered later) and enjoyed myself the entire time.

Wes is excellent at explaining concepts and more importantly you can hear the excitement in his voice as he creates something that I have to assume he has practiced 3 or 4 times before recording. The excitement is infectious and makes you want to play with the code more.

The course contains 31 videos in total, averaging out at about 15 minutes per video and you get access to both a starter file a solution file for each project.

I wasn’t able to stick to doing one a day because of other commitments, but I did see a lot of folk on twitter moving through them daily, which was inspiring.

A transcript for each episode would have been nice, I sometimes enjoy reading something even if I have just watched it.

What was really nice is the videos do have captioning included. Not something I needed but I’m a huge fan of captioning.

What I specifically learned

Here are some concepts that I either didn’t know existed or had never used them before;

• CSS Variables
• console.assert()
• console.count()
• Some of the video Event Listeners
• The Geolocation API
• The Speech API

This isn’t exhaustive and doesn’t begin to scratch the things that I had already known about but in no way knew as well as I did after completing this course.

In conclusion

I think you know what I am going to say here. You should 100% check out this course if you’re interested in improving your JavaScript. It is free and well worth your time.

If you do check it out or if you have already looked at it I’d love to know how far you got and what you thought of it.