Roadmap to Learn JavaScript

JavaScript is such an amazing language!

Born as a simple way to manipulate documents in the browser, over the years it became the most popular programming language in the world, and now runs everywhere.

Here is an attempt to draft a roadmap to learn JavaScript.

Note: I added all those in a handy PDF/ePub, download it now

Beginner’s guides

First, dive into the introductory guide to the language, and dive into the overview of the “latest and greatest” additions to the language. It’s useless to learn the “old way” of doing things when in the last 3 years how we all use the language changed so much.

• Introduction to JavaScript
• The ECMAScript 2015-2017 Guide
• The JavaScript Glossary
• A quick reference to the modern JavaScript syntax

Basics of the language

Next, this is a more in-depth analysis of the building blocks of JavaScript.

• JavaScript Lexical Structure
• JavaScript Expressions
• JavaScript Types
• JavaScript Variables
• JavaScript Math Operators
• JavaScript Functions
• JavaScript Immediately-Invoked Function Expressions IIFE
• this
• JavaScript Arrow Functions
• JavaScript Loops
• JavaScript Loops and Scope
• JavaScript Arrays
• JavaScript Template Literals
• JavaScript Semicolons
• Strict Mode

The JavaScript built-in objects

• JavaScript Dates
• The Math Object

Asynchronous programming

JavaScript is big on asynchronous programming. Learn all the basics!

• Asynchronous programming and callbacks
• JavaScript Timers
• JavaScript Promises
• Async and Await

Events

• The JavaScript Event Loop
• JavaScript Events

Advanced topics

Some more advanced topics before you go ahead to learn something new

• JavaScript Functional Programming
• Efficiently load JavaScript with defer and async
• CORS
• JavaScript Closures
• JavaScript Regular Expressions
• Unicode in JavaScript

Data Structures

• The JavaScript Map Data Structure
• The JavaScript Set Data Structure

The Web Platform

Cookies, localStorage, the History API, Fetch, Cache, Service Workers, it’s all explained in the Web Platform APIs Guide. Lots of things in there!

How-tos

Here are some little how-to posts that can shed a light on some JavaScript tasks, and as a side effect better understand what JavaScript can do and how it works:

• Generate random and unique strings in JavaScript
• How to inspect a JavaScript object
• How to trim the leading zero in a number
• How to replace all occurrences of a string
• How to check if an object property is undefined
• How to append an item to an array
• How to remove a property from an object
• How to get the current timestamp
• How to convert a string to a number
• How to format a number as currency
• How to uppercase the first letter of a string
• How to deep clone an object
• How to remove an item from an array
• How to check if a string contains a substring

What’s next?

If you’re ready to go ahead and dive into more advanced lands, check out React and server-side JavaScript with Node.js.