My Personal and Favorite Learning Resources as a Developer
Thanks to the Internet we have access to a lot of information. This is a wonderful thing but at the same time it could be overwhelming and frustrating, especially when you are searching for a learning resource. There’s so many people out there saying: learn this in 5 minutes, watch this video tutorial, I even wrote and article about what I do when I’m coding using React. I still ask myself: “is this a good article?” “it worth it to pay for this book?” or “ should I buy this course?” These questions are sometimes resolved reading other people’s opinions about certain books or video tutorials. In the case of books, especially about coding, algorithms, and so on, it is so hard to understand them. Some of these “technical books” — as I call them — leave you a bitter flavor of “ugh, this book was a waste of money.” Here I will share my opinion about some resources, books and courses, that I need constantly in my life and some of them might be old but I’m still using them 😃.
Books 📚
CSS Secrets: Better Solutions To Everyday Web Design Problems
This is one of the coolest and most beautiful books that I’ve got. If you can buy it, do it, you won’t regret. Starting from a banal vision, each single page of this book has a beautiful and colorful design, the texture is like a magazine and the amount of content is amazing. Speaking about the content, everything in this book is well divided, everything is connected perfectly: images with explanation and the code examples. Definitely it has the best solutions and they are “secret” solutions, and I couldn’t wait for less because this books was written by the amazing and freaking smart woman Lea Verou. I recommend you look for some conferences she has given. Her presentations are amazing. But, pay attention to them, she speaks really fast and makes fast mathematical calculations ⚠️.
You Don’t Know JS — The Saga!
This is a 6 book saga. The nice thing about these books is how well everything is explained, and of course, because it was written by Kyle Simpson. He is a teacher — besides many other things — and you can see this while you’re reading his books. Kyle goes through the very basic things about JavaScript like scope until advanced and cool knowledge such a Symbols and Async/Await. He also wrote another book about Functional Programming. The nice thing about this last book it is that it was written with the help of a lot of people around the world. This books is for free reading it on Github or you can buy it digitally. I also recommend you search for some of his talks about JavaScript and the weird parts of it.
Docker Deep Dive
The title says it all. It is a book with a deep dive into the Docker world. The author, Nigel Pouton gives you a bunch of useful knowledge in this book in order to work with Docker in a professional manner. He explains everything so well that even the hardest things about Docker are easy to understand, and that, in the computing world, is difficult to get in a book and he deserves my applauses 👌. I still go to my digital version to read some stuffs because this book is an essential tool.
The Complete Redux Book
If you are starting in the React world you might ending up working at some point with Redux. This was and it is yet one of my essential reads about Redux. I don’t know much about the authors Ilya Gelman and Boris Dinkevich, but I’ve watch some of the conferences made by 500Tech and these guys Rock! I can tell you they have done an amazing job writing this book. The whole book covers the set-up, performance improvement and some patterns, all of this following the same example. This book will help you to work neatly with Redux.
High Performance JavaScript
Please, don’t think because is an old book it doesn’t have valuable information. Nicholas C. Zakas wrote this simple and good book. If you are a beginner with JavaScript and manipulating the DOM, this is a book you must read. But it is not only for beginners, it is also for people that work with JavaScript in general. As an example he explains the use of the global scope, how actually works going beyond the words, this is essential to understand the basic concepts about performance on JavaScript.
Courses 🎥
Learn How To Code: Google’s Go (golang) Programming Language
This is a course that you can find on Udemy. If you are starting with Go like me, I recommend this course 100%. I finished all the course and I have to say that I’m still watching it because it helps me to remember Go stuff. I’m a huge fan of Todd McLeod. He’s a professor and you can see that through the entire course. And the most important thing, he is a person; he behaves like that through all the videos, talking not only about Go, but also about friends, his work as a professor, even the few hours he’s been sleeping because he was preparing all the content for his videos. Definitely, this is for beginners and intermediate levels. He also has a YouTube Channel where he’s constantly showing how to code with Go, especially websites.
Docker and Kubernetes: The Complete Guide
I found Stephen Grider when I was searching for a MongoDB course, and I loved how well he explained everything, it is worth it to buy his course. He even covered more content like testing and for me, at that moment, it was important because I needed to know how to write tests. Due to all of that, when I was searching for a Docker course and found one made by Stephen I didn’t hesitate and I bought it. This course is so good for any level of knowledge. One of the nice things is that you will see some common mistakes and how to resolve them, you will understand in short videos all the essentials and more about Docker.
React — The Complete Guide (incl Hooks, React Router and Redux)
This course is good for beginners. In my case I found nothing I didn’t already knew, but I must say that Maximilian Schwarzmüller did an amazing job. He is really good explaining everything about React. He touches all the topics that you should definitely know about React. I recommend this video for beginners and intermediate levels. He also has a YouTube Channel that is really worth to checking out.
Learn and Understand NodeJS
When you search for learning NodeJS on Google most of the time you will find how to use NodeJS with ExpressJS. Learning NodeJS is more than implementing a framework and making an API or a website. Anthony Alicea made such a wonderful course about NodeJS. He dives into the core of NodeJS. You will learn and understand how it really works. He will show you why NodeJS is so powerful and gives you a very good and solid experience about NodeJS and its dependencies. In this course you will learn how to work with emit events, streams, using pipe, and so on. This is a course you should buy before starting with ExpressJS or any other NodeJS framework.
These are my favorite resources and I’m always going back to them when I don’t remember something. A personal thought, I know more thanks to these people and they are a nice inspiration to never stop learning.
I hope you liked the article and that it is has been helpful for you.
As always thanks to J. Drake, my husband, for helping me review this article. ❤️
Cheers!
