Why should you learn JavaScript in 2021 ?

This is the first blog in the series "JavaScript Made Easy". I'll keep on writing, on my learnings and experiments with JavaScript so far. This blog is intended for anyone who is staring their developer journey or who is just curious about JavaScript.

Before we jump in to 'what' and 'how' of JavaScript we must know why one must learn JavaScript ?

1. JavaScript is in high demand : If you look at the job postings and trends across the job portals, the demand of software engineers having experience in JavaScript is all time high. The JavaScript is must have skill for anyone who is aspiring to build a career in Web Development

2. Easy for the beginners : If you want to start learning any programming language, the first hurdle that you may come across would be setting development environment for it. Here comes the JavaScript for you, the JavaScript is most beginner friendly language you'll come across. With almost zero experience and setup requirement you can start learning JavaScript on your browser's developer console itself .

3. Learn Once Apply Everywhere : JavaScript is everywhere, once you learn it you can apply it anywhere. JavaScript is being used everywhere, from front-end to middleware, backend, desktop applications, mobile applications, almost everything is being developed using JavaScript now a days.

4. Strong and Rich Community of Developers : The JavaScript Developer community is quite rich, if you stuck anywhere you can expect help from fellow developers. With it's strong and developer friendly community there is solution to any problem in JavaScript ecosystem.

5. Flexibility : This is important from developers point of view. The coding pattern in quite flexible in JavaScript. One can pick and design solution in paradigm of their choice, JavaScript is not mapped to particular design paradigm (e.g. Imperative, Object Oriented Programming, Functional Programming).

6. Rich Library Support : You can find a library for almost any adjective in JavaScript. There is a library for almost everything e.g. Moment, Server, Email etc.

7. JavaScript is foundation for High Demand modern Front end Frameworks : The React JS, Vue JS, Angular are three most desired frameworks/libraries for modern front end UI development. While it is tempting to jump directly to code in to these frameworks but if you struggle with the vanilla JavaScript you are most likely to struggle with those frameworks as well. The JavaScript is basic building block of almost all modern UI framework , if you understand the JavaScript well you'll have smooth learning experience with frameworks.

Frameworks will come and go, JavaScript Stays

1. JavaScript is evolving: The JavaScript is ever evolving scripting language, if you are familiar with the earlier versions of JavaScript (especially before ES6), you'll know what a real struggle was and how the versions after ES6 made the life easy (e.g. Spread Operator and arrow functions). We will learn in details about this in next post of this series.