Hi, Habr!

For the past few months, we have been working in Hexlet on new courses and platform updates. Now there are four “ professions ” available on the site, this is what we call sequential training programs in different areas, from beginner to junior. One of the professions is over, and the rest continue to leave new courses. Today I want to tell about the most important direction for us today - JavaScript, in particular the profession "Frontend JS-programmer".

We didn’t go the standard way " hello world, make a form, add animation, learn OOP ", but took the approach to the study of programming as a whole, and not specifically the JavaScript language. The language is used as a tool for solving problems and applying the concepts and ideas studied. With this, we study the latest standard ES6 and from the very beginning we introduce students to the right environments and techniques: modules, package manager, debugging, unit testing.

Here is the training program:

1. The life of a programmer . About the profession, the types of companies and types of development.
2. Basics of programming . Foundation: coding, errors, debugging, functions, side effects, data types. And, of course, basic things like numbers, strings, conditions, etc.
3. JS: preparation for work . Install and configure the environment - node, npm, atom.
4. JS: Composite data . As from simple data types to make more complex. Abstraction from numbers to objects.
5. Bash: Command line basics .
6. JS: Sequences . We write our own HTML generator and study filter, map, reduce.
7. JS: Data Driven Programming . Types, messages, OOP and TDD.
8. JS: Collections . Arrays, associative arrays, memoization, lazy calculations.
9. JS: Prototypes . Implementing OOP in JS.
10. JS: Error Handling . Exceptions. Work on your "file system".
11. JS: Algorithms . Data Structures, Complexity, Big O, P vs. Np.
12. Reactjs: Start . JSX, virtual DOM, components.
13. HTTP protocol
14. Linux: Users

The courses have video lessons, practical exercises and tests. The first three courses, as well as the Bash course, are free and available to everyone.

We believe that a real programmer should understand how a computer works, and have abstract thinking. He should see the problem, not the task. Must be able to analyze and reason at the problem level and above, and not only at the code level. Therefore, we have built our program in such a way that after completion a person can easily switch to another language or platform, it will be a question for him to become familiar with the syntax and rules. Because throughout the course he studied primarily programming , not a programming language .

Other platform updates

• In addition to the exercises inside the lessons, we have added additional practice .
• You can send your solution to any exercise to code review. Other users, teachers and mentors can check and comment on it.
• We have mentors who will help solve problems, answer questions and carry out code review. The closed testing of the mentoring program has recently ended, and there will be a public release in the coming weeks.
• “Projects” are being prepared for release - full-fledged independent tasks with different levels of complexity and the help of mentors.
• Opened Hexlet News - a social aggregator of useful links for programmers.
• There are already 113 thousand users on Hekslet!

So it goes.