One of the most popular programming languages today is JavaScript since it is the de-facto standard for enabling interactive interfaces in websites. Today the language is versatile enough to be used in developing of different types of systems i.e. web, mobile and desktop applications.
With the knowledge of JavaScript the programmer has a high chance to either specialize as back-end or front-end or full-stack developer.
For that very reason, we thought training programmers/coders about ES6 JavaScript in particular would be rewarding to them and the market at large.
The training’s venue was Africa’sTalking spacious office on 4th floor, Acacia Place, Kisementi, Kampala – Uganda. Running for two days on 14th from 4pm to 6pm and 15th from 10am to 5pm. A total of five developers attended the training. David M. Wampamba, a co-founder of Ablestate was the lead trainer in this interactive training.
What did we learn?
The training which majorly covered ECMAScript 6 (ES6) helped the trainees learn about the following:-
Constants – The variables who values you can’t change.
Block scope – How the let keyword comes in for the var keyword, for better variable creation and management.
Template literals (Backticks) – A cleaner way to generate strings
Function expressions – The new way of creating functions in JavaScript without using the keyword function.
Modules – To separate concerns, one has to break their code into separate groups of files aka modules. Fortunately JavaScript ES6 allows us to use the import and export keywords to export and import different modules in our application.
Classes – This is a way to create blue prints of custom objects in JavaScript.
Promises – These help us to overcome tthe callback hell, especially during asynchronous processes.
The spread operator (…) – Can be helpful in many situations some of them being; creating of functions which receive any number of parameters and merging of arrays.
Loops( for… in, for…of, forEach, Array.map) – Loop an array or object, for different reasons. For example
for…in iterates over the give array to give you access to each element in the array.
for…ofiterates over an array to help you access the index of the current element in the array.
forEach works similarly to the for…in except it accepts a callback function which accepts three parameters. But the current element in the array is required/mandatory. For each iteration the forEach calls the callback to perform a custom action on the current element in the array. This can be good for validating values of an array object.
Array.map – works like the forEach except, it returns a new array after it finishes the iterating.
Destructuring – a way of creating and poking variables together with their values from a given object or array.
What some of the trainees say?
The learners who attended the training session loved it and were happy to talk about it. Take a look at what they said on facebook.
What next?
After collecting feedback from the trainees, we shall have a concluding session covering promises, async/await and fetch. This remainder of the session will be conducted online to enable everyone attend it from a convenient location.
We are organizing more training sessions about programming in different languages, stay tuned for more learning opportunities.
