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Ask HN: Recommend a platform to learn web dev?

5 points by zaptheimpaler ↗ HN
Hi,

I have basic experience with web dev way back in 2010, using Ruby on Rails & jQuery.

I want to learn modern web dev which seems much more complex.

I am completely agnostic to language/platform, the #1 priority is an ecosystem which has a good understanding and exposition of key and modern ideas. This means documentation, open source projects and chatrooms. Ease of tooling is also a big plus.

What would you recommend? React.js + CSS + backend server seems good, but the tooling is a little scary. And its documentation doesn't seem to explain the key ideas behind modern apps that well.

5 comments

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sebg
Any reason you wouldn't want to stick with RoR? It's still heavily used...

That said, one way to go about it is to look at what people are currently hiring today (or as of 2 days ago)....

You can look at this thread on HN -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15824597 and look for companies that you'd want to work for. Then learn that :)

zaptheimpaler
I would be happy with RoR, but i am still clueless on how to make SPA/rich type apps which have more to do with JS.
matchmike1313
Using Rails 5.1 you can integrate Webpack into Rails and thus setup full React or Vue apps with SPA navigation. I would highly recommend it as you can focus on learning the new JS frameworks but have the comfort of Rails for the backend without a headless situation.
matchmike1313
If you want to go all-in, I would suggest React Create App with a Rails or Python API.
oblib
Depends on what you want to build but I'll offer you look into CouchDB/PouchDB for backend data/authentication and jQuery/Bootstrap for the front end.

This lets you code most all of the app functions in JS so it runs almost entirely on the client side, provides what's needed for offline use, syncs the user's client side data with your server automatically or on demand, and gives you a reactive front end that will run on most any device in a web browser.

The docs for all of those are first rate with lots of example code to get you started and CouchDB/PouchDB have great community support.