I am back to share with you my thoughts and learnings on the path to become an ethereum or in general "decentralized app"-Developer, short dapp-developer.
The last post I did was about "Joining the web developer bootcamp" on an online learning platform which is called "Udemy". First of all: Udemy is really great I did say this in the last post as well but I feel like I have to mention it a couple of times more because this type of learning just hast to spread more. The goal for me is still to develop dapps with ethereum OR maybe even with EOS when it comes out. For now it was really nice to learn a lot of the stuff that you need for normal web applications. I know that I probably shouldn't start with smart contracts developing where a lot of stuff can go wrong and real value can be lost. So even after I finished this course I'll stick with learning more before going into the critical stuff but I will definitely be doing that. I just don't know when.
Concepts and tools
So what did we do in the course? Maybe someone else is interested in doing this course so I will briefly go through what I think are the most important points that I learned.
In the last post I wrote about beginning from scratch with html, css and javascript. I skipped some of these videos because I know basic control structures and their behavior and I also know some html, css and javascript so the exciting parts for me came after that.
It makes sense to show students JQuery very early because it makes stuff way more simple. JQuery helps you to write code where you can select parts of your web page. For example you can easily select a heading and add an onClickListener that does something when you click on that heading. For everyone who isn't a programmer: If we didn't have jQuery we would have to write a lot more code to do the same thing. So it makes stuff simpler and that's always warmly welcomed by programmers.
The next important point that we learned was node.js. With node.js you can write code in familiar javascript language that the server can understand. Earlier I would have had to learn PHP to do the same things. We were using "express" to do the server requests. A request is something like: "www.steemit.com/awesomeBlog/". With express you can write code that tells the application which site it has to show you. The really good thing about node.js is also that you have a lot of libraries that you can use. So libraries are code that someone else wrote that you are just free to use. That is super convenient.
On top of that we did a little exercise with API's where we took the imdb-API and made a little app where you could search through the imdb database. This made me more familiar with the JSON-Object which is also needed for developing in ethereum because basically you plug in your smart contract as a JSON-Object into your web page. We learned how to use authentication and how to use MongoDB and what RESTful routing is. Authentication is probably something that would be different with ethereum but nevertheless it's still good to know how it's "traditionally" done. RESTful routing is the way that URL requests should be structured. For example if we have a page that is about beautiful plants from the amazonas then the request to see all the plants should be "www.mypage.com/amazonasplants" and the request to look at one particular plant should be "www.mypage.com/amazonasplants/:id" with "id" being an id from the MongoDB which corresponds to the plant that you whant to look at. To make a comment to that plant you would have to go to "www.mypage.com/amazonasplants/:id/comment/new". Colt Steele even took the time to show us how to use Git and Github and how to deploy your app once it's done.
TL;DR
I subscribed to an Web Developer Course on Udemy and learned all the basic stuff that you need to create a web page. I payed 15 euro for it and it was worth it ten times.
What's next
I will continue learning Angular 2 now to make cool Single-Page applications. Also I am working on a start-up project where I have to make a page that displays information from an elevator. Exciting times ahead.
Thanks for reading and have a great day :)