Frontend Learning Approach (Not Roadmap)

Mohammad Arif — Sun, 21 Aug 2022 09:52:00 +0000

A roadmap is a strategic plan that defines a goal or desired outcome and includes the major steps or milestones needed to reach it.

We already have so many roadmaps on the web the popular one is (https://roadmap.sh/frontend) to get into World of frontend but less talk about approach here.

What is Approach?

An approach is a way of looking at teaching and learning.
An approach gives rise to methods, the way of teaching something.

Essentially it's all about approach to learn something new that's the missing piece on the block, one could see rise of Coding Bootcamps and plethora of unorganized YouTube videos which drives the upcoming/existing web dev population to learn something new essentially ends up not learning much against what you supposed to achieve.

Let's try to understand learning first.

What is Learning?

Learning is a process of actively constructing knowledge.

Learning is also the process of gaining knowledge and expertise. Some learning is immediate, induced by a single event, but much skill and knowledge accumulate from repeated experiences and that's the key in frontend space.

Let's try to look at various important factors in order to learn something effectively.

Health

Since learning is an active process, students must have adequate rest, health, and physical ability. Basic needs of students must be satisfied before they are ready or capable of learning. Students who are exhausted or in ill health cannot learn much and it also improves your memory.

Repeated Experiences

Let’s Do It Again . . . and Again! Why is Repetition Important to Learning?

"Repetition is the mother of learning, the father of action, which makes it the architect of accomplishment.”
~Zig Ziglar

Exercise

Every time practice occurs, learning continues.

These include student recall, review and summary, and manual drill and physical applications. All of these serve to create learning habits.

But how do we do it without instructor, we talk about it later please hand on.

Fail fast

Research suggests that making mistakes when learning can actually help improve outcomes, especially if you correct your mistake and take the time to understand why it happened.

Now that's the key here, it's the fear factor and one of the driver of imposter syndrome (doubting your own abilities).

Fail as early as possible that's give the chance to improve and fix the knowledge gaps.

Organise The Learning

One of my personal favourite to learn something new is to organise the learning so what does it mean let's take an example.

You want to learn React or some other framework/library so what all steps do you follow

Go to google and start typing some keywords to learn React
Go to youtube to start learning the basics
Buy some courses from Udemy
Various other resources to start learning React

Is it all what we need to follow in order to learn React?

The famous quote:

Don't learn things randomly

What's the way out there for organise learning?

Official Documentation yesss you may find sound awkward but believe me that's the missing glue.

Let me try to explain it further as we talking about React let's take the example further.

The official React documentation isn't that effective and the core team knows about it and that's why they have been working on another version of React Documentation BETA which is 70% finished as of writing the article.

Now as a beginner you just need to take the path starting from Installation to Escape Hatches.

Don't skip even a single para and the Challenges and feel free to go back to previous learning till you grasp entirely without any doubt.

By end of the React Docs BETA Learn section you would know the things like Thinking in React, Component, Props, State, Updating Objects/Array in State, Managing State etc.

By the time you complete the Learn section from official React BETA website you have covered the ground to build stuff on top of it.

Eventually there is no silver bullet and it also depends upon the individual's to learn stuff.

Following above steps may help you to reach your learning goal in an organise way :)

Do remember the famous quote:

“You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over.” – Richard Branson

About the Author 👨🏾‍💻

I'm Mohammad Arif. A Leader, Mentor & UI Architect. If you want more content, follow me on GitHub at https://github.com/mdarif.

Thanks for reading!

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