Learning Vue

Recently, I had to do some thinking to figure out some goals for the year and possibly beyond. As much as I feel like I have a pretty good knowledge set under my belt, companies are always looking for more. The reason why might have to do with a lot of things. Maybe the person posting the job doesn’t know any better. Maybe they genuinely want someone who is a “jack of all trades” type. Could be they figure the person they get better be on at least one train of the latest and greatest something. Whatever the case, I figured it was time for me to actually learn a front end framework from top to bottom.

Enter Vue

I’ve looked into various frameworks before. The first one I actually started with was Angular. While I did like Angular, it wasn’t exactly easy to learn. At least, not how or where I learned it. Since then, Angular has changed. Oh yea, and it changed again. Well, at least in name anyways. My personal opinion is that Google’s documentation with these things is also only a little good. So that didn’t help matters. The point is, I really didn’t feel like Angular was the way to go.

Recently though, I came upon Vue. I read a few articles on it and some basic getting started bits and found that it is just so much easier to get going than Angular. At least it is for me. I was up and running with it very fast. This is good, because I’m pretty sure that’s what the makers of Vue were going for.

I’ve heard similar stories from other developers in a position like myself who are just getting into frameworks that Vue is by far the most friendly to get started with as well. I’ve even heard tell of some developers switching from their Angular stack to a Vue one. Sweet!

Learning bit by bit

I looked around for some good places for someone to walk me though Vue. Laracasts’ Vue courses were really invaluable to me here. Jeffery really has some great topics in there (and for free!) Through watching his videos, I really got to have a nice high level vantage of Vue and get my feet wet.

Of course, I’m one who learns best not just by watching videos or tutorials but also through doing in actual code by myself. It also became apparent I should try to know Vue really deeply if I wanted to leverage its full potential. To that end, I went off and bought a course over Memorial Day (some searching for recommendations had this one pretty high on the list). I’ve gotten though about 10% of it so far (there are over 300 lessons). I’m hoping to get through all of them in my spare time in the next month.

Looking ahead

So far, I’m really enjoying learning Vue. Because of Laracasts’ course, I’ve already got an idea of what is coming in my Udemy course, but I’ll know what’s going on much more intimately (at least, that’s the idea). There is so much potential to build some really cool stuff. Unfortunately, I’m most likely not going to get to use Vue too much where I’m at now (at least, not until I can convince some other developers to get on board). I think it’ll get folded into the new version of my site though for sure. It should come in handy in the future for other projects or if demand for more app-like sites keeps going up (and I think it will). It never hurts to learn new things. I’ll just have to be careful not to use it just because I can (hammers and nails and all that).

Over Reaction

Some people might be reading this and saying, “Dude! Why didn’t you go for React?!” Well React people, fear not. Vue seems to have a very low barrier to entry compared to React. I’m using it as a stepping stone so I can better understand React when I learn it. When I bought my Vue course I also bought the top React course. So, all in good time. I plan on learning some React basics at Laracasts again before I switch over to my paid course. I’m hoping learning both will be extra beneficial.