A friend and I have committed to do the NodeSchool courses to learn Node.js. We’ve even gone to the length to create a Slack group to keep each other motivated

To make sure I have the basics down I tried the javascripting workshopper. What this means is that once you install Node and NPM you can install a specific package that is a self-contained program. This program, the workshopper, has a basic menu that prints out some concepts for whatever you’re learning on the screen as well as instructions for an exercise. You can use the workshopper to try running your exercise answer and also have it verify your answer. It’s very-high quality as far as I can tell. It gets people coding immediately and not reading a ton of theory.

I ran the workshopper using the OS X default terminal. The workshopper displays the instructions and then you have to make a file and then run it through the workshopper. One thing that helped was using the screen program that apparently installed with OS X. Here’s a good tutorial I used to get up and running with it quickly: http://www.kinnetica.com/2011/05/29/using-screen-on-mac-os-x/. The benefit of this is not having to switch back-and-forth between the instructions and your work file so that you can progress faster.

Whomever is behind the workshopper is a very generous person! I ran through the exercises and I like the feedback loop I get from progressively completing the exercises. I do feel that it helps to have some programming background before trying these out. Curious to know how this would work with someone who’s never touched a line of code in his or her life.

One thing I am trying to decide is whether to go through the workshops in order or just jump straight to the Node stuff:

  1. javascripting
  2. git-it
  3. Scopes Chains & Closures
  4. learnyounode
  5. How to npm
  6. stream-adventure

There are a ton of electives too which is neat. Can’t wait to go through these. I feel like modern frameworks and languages have a lot better ways of learning than the older ones.