AngularJS, Recommendations, Thoughts

Learning by Doing: The Real Path Down AngularJS

This is the third and last part in the Guide to Self-teaching AngularJS Trilogy. If you haven’t gone through the first one, do it now, here. If you’ve already covered the first two, nice job on the hard work!

Read on.

When you’re done with all of the above: there’s no point learning for learning’s sake from this point onward.

No matter how good one is with the basics of a new language, they will forget most of it if they simply have no use for it. More importantly, they won’t know what vocabulary they would actually be needing in daily life by reciting after a dictionary. Similarly, what you need now is not more research topics, but actual real projects. Do everything to solve the problems you run into on the way. This, is how you really learn the real useful stuff.

Day by day your building blocks of tools would become more systemised, the once alien concepts come with increasing ease and instinct.

My Angular related knowledge was mostly limited to ng-repeat and ng-click when a potential employer asked for an Angular demo by mail. Luckily it was on Friday, so I did everything I could and whipped this out over the weekend, which the interviewer was happy enough about. So yes, if your self-teaching abilities have already enabled you to come this far, it is perfectly legit to go get an AngularJS job when you’re just starting. Simply be honest with your stage of competence, show them the demo you made, and let them know how good you are with learning new things, and with solving whatever problems that come along the way.

However, even knowing full well that I needed to use something to master it, I didn’t try to make anything substantial before specifically asked to.

So if you really want to go down Angular’s way, either:

  • build that thing you’ve always wanted to build with Angular,
  • persuade your co-workers/boss to use Angular in your day job, or
  • get a new day job with it.

When one day you suddenly realise that the new knowledge you are acquiring is becoming more of a complement than a vital organ to the tree of knowledge you’ve been growing, that’s when you know you’ve had it mastered.

 

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