Is meteor good for a Beginner developer?

I read this medium article along with others echoing these views: https://medium.com/@kevininaniche/learning-javascript-and-the-danger-of-spreading-yourself-too-thin-4617384e7ea4#.z1xubyeew

It states one should learn JS proper and not rely on frameworks. While I agree with the premise, I have been learning meteor for a while and only have fundamental js knowledge gained while using meteor and find I was able to build a responsive website with database integration and all. I am also learning python for web development even before discovering meteor and I feel it would have been more difficult or taken longer to implement a website of this type in python.

While I do like python, should I keep learning meteor or learn JavaScript fully?

@digitalx778 You can compare the process with war.

When war comes, it rains horror on the just and unjust alike. No time to train, no time to learn how to survive. Those who survives one day use what they learnt in that day to survive another day. Slowly they learn the tactics over the time.

So, Use meteor & build a product (survive) and keep learning javaScript (war tactics) slowly. One day you will become a veteran. I started web development with python and was stuck. 2 months later I found meteor and built myself a tiny app ( startup targeted towards a very niche market) thats doing fine at the moment. I am still learning meteor and javaScript and web development. But at least I have a product in hand that pays money. How ever small that amount may be, It gave me enough space/time/money to pursue a career in web development. I doubt I could get that milage from python this early.

Take a read of my journey here https://meteoruniversity.org/how-i-launched-my-startup-in-3-months-with-meteor-mentor-group/

And join the free meteor-mentor group. It will help you if you are stuck. It helped me a lot.

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I’ll give you my 2 cents, as I recognise your sentiment from my rocky road learning JavaScript.

I really think it depends what you are trying to achieve. If your goal is to learn programming then I would argue that it doesn’t matter which language you start with. JavaScript or Python will lead you down the road of learning the fundermentals of understanding functions, varibles, logic arguments etc.

I’ve heard allot of “don’t work with frameworks before you’ve put the hard work in to learn the basics” talk too. As someone who pretty much ignored that I’ll tell you picking the new ‘best’ framework every 6 months is a very confusing way to learn. But it’s great fun too. Build tools like Meteor give us noobs (forgive me if u don’t categories yourself as that, I still do after 5 years) a false sence of proficiency at JavaScript I think, but they also keep us excited by its possibilities which for me is vital to keep going.

I’ve found the best advice to be:

  1. Build something. Be it Python, JavaScript whatever but actually try and finish something so that it works. The ToDo app tutorials are great but you learn nothing as a beginner until you turn your brain to making something of your own design.

  2. When you ask questions on StackOverflow try and show what effort you’ve made to figure it out, it helps get decent responses.

  3. When you get an error message, which will be all the time, read it. So often the answer is in it (often in language you won’t understand though) try and trace the error yourself it’s probably a typo.

  4. In all of your experimenting and cutting and pasting from tutorials try and force yourself to actually type the code, its tedious but you will begin to see the symmetry and structure of the actual language.

  5. Realise that if you actually learn a language first it’s going to be 100 times easier, take you 4 years less to understand what’s going on and make you a better programmer. Yeah I know it’s just too much fun playing with the magic though :slight_smile:

Edit: I realise I didn’t actually answer your question… Yes I think meteor is great way to learn because really it’s best at taking all the BS out of setting up a dev environment and linking data to the client quickly and easily, just realise one day you will have to learn how it does it to get the best from it.

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Learn to code.

Learn to read code like you where english, and learn to think in code.

Design concepts in your mind.

It doesn’t matter what language you realise your ideas in, once you can think in code and know fundamental programming logic you can move between literally any language in a rapid manner. Because all languages have similarities and there are always manuals to read…

I think the moral is really to know the philosophy of computing so that you can implement the current tools available to render your requirements a reality. I started on BASIC with a BBCMicro in 1992. I have learned almost every language and forgotten alot of it. But if I needed I could pick it up in a moment because even since 1992 to now, code is code. Logic is logic. And it will never really be changed just improved with newer tools and solutions to age old problems.

ecmascript / Javascript is a very simple language with huge potential and power, it’s vastly similar to many other languages also so you should not feel it difficult to write some actionscript after using javascript, also you should have no issue moving into node if you have purely been using jquery, its just swimming to another part of the lake so to speak. The water my be different temperature, but you’re still swimming.

Learn every framework you can, they are all pretty much the same in what they achieve, but implementation and naming can vary to achieve different things for your app. With the usage of NPM, bower and atmosphere though we always have some centralised code base.

Once you have looked around you can then choose which one is the best solution for your task - from an informed point of view. It doesn’t take long to do a hello world example in each and see what you like best.

I choose meteor currently because I get paid on time, the client is happy and my family see more of me. I only work 4 hours a day and meteor is vital to keeping it that way.

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From what i remember, much have changed from start of Meteor, in my opinion, Meteor is no longer a platform, appliable for newbies. Too many things to care about, too many things that may go wrong even when everything worked in a first place. Meteor involves and becomes flexible and incredible powerful, but trades simplicity for its power. With Meteor updates coming up, you may find yourself unable to track all the changes inside the community.

Meteor isn’t hard to learn, yet. i would not recommend it to a beginner if you like to track "new things"
As people say, learn js, focus on yourself, rather than on framework marketing choice, it doesn’t really matter what you use to express yourself or earning money, but if you have patience, you’ll love Meteor one day.

This is what got me thinking. With all the new stuff coming down I feel it will be difficult to keep up. If I am able to use SQL, I hope I can just add that and not worry to much about the other components.

Meteor still “can” be easy to use. It all depends on how you use it. All the new features are optional.

The problem right now is the documentation for new users is extremely lacking. The tutorials are a lot more advanced, and the older documentation (such as DiscoverMeteor) still work completely fine, except for the fact that it’s focused on IronRouter and FlowRouter has now become the standard. But overall, it still works fine!

Another problem I see is there is a huge focus with people here talking like they are preparing for huge enterprise apps. Which brings in decisions like React, etc. But you definitely do not need to start your Meteor journey by learning React! But don’t be fooled by what people say on here. Meteor is just fine without any extra learning curve!

In the end, I do think MDG is in dire need of completely recreating a section for new users. The “My First Meteor Application” tutorial is way more advanced than the average user will need, and more importantly not presented in a way that truly teaches a new user.

On the topic of SQL- that will all be determined on how Apollo turns out. We will have to wait and see!

I’ll be the first to give an actual yes or no answer, and the answer is yes. It is good for a beginner developer.

The amount of configuration the Meteor provides out of the box is better than any other web framework I’ve used. It’s good enough that you’ll be able to spend more time actually learning javascript rather than putting files in the right places and typing the right things into your terminal app.

Read the Getting Started page. It is the best getting started experience I have ever used.

It’s a monolithic framework, so there’s a downside to that. For example, you won’t learn common javascript ecosystem tools like webpack or various import systems. On the plus side, you won’t learn common javascript ecosystem tools like webpack or various import systems.

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Hi Kayes are you able to share the app you built using meteor. I am studying JS (a beginner) and plan on learning JQuery and then Express JS, but I have also signed up to a Coursera course on Meteor.

Wondering if it possible to use meteor to build an app that can generate a couple of thousand dollars a month to help me transition to working on programming full time form my current job…

thanks

If you want a job, don’t focus on Meteor. I love it for prototyping and small projects, but not many companies (at least around me) are using Meteor for anything.

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Maye there aren’t any jobs specific to meteor but what does it matter what tools you use once it solves a problem for a user or group of users. I ain’t no expert but I like how they are making radical changes to the framework in order to cater for new types of web apps. [quote=“wkniffin, post:10, topic:25038”]
I love it for prototyping and small projects, but not many companies (at least around me) are using Meteor for anything.
[/quote]
I don’t think would MDG put resources into building a platform for just prototyping.

It’s a rocky road, Meteor is/was great but it is becoming very fragmented and it is difficult to keep track, or even know, what parts of your application is “meteor” and what is stuff made by the community, modules which gets abandoned and suddenly your app stops working and you have make your own forks, redesign or whatever. I guess it can not be in any other way when it is open source and nobody want to spend the rest of their life supporting and updating projects for free and by doing that being unable to embark on new exciting missions.

But frameworks are good, it saves an enormous amount of time and leads you to places you would never reached if you tried it without. Javascript without framework is walking, the framework is a vehicle that brings you quickly to the destination at the cost of seeing less of the scenery.

So learn javascript from books, youtube or whatever, but use a framework when you actually want to create something.

It is a bit funny though, there are a huge amounts of frameworks out there, all of them start out with the object of simplify while expanding the possibilities. Then they grow and start to become more and more fragmented, more and more compatible with other frameworks and after a while they becomes so complex that people start abandoning them in favor for the new, simpler framework that some group of smart people decided they need to make.

Maybe one day someone with real resources will take upon them to make a framework that is really supported and predictable, a bit like what Ubuntu did for Linux.

There is a limit for when flexibility becomes a drawback rather than an advantage. If you buy a Ferrari you are not interested in features that turns it into a flatbed truck with just the right tools.

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I’d say it depends if you want to LEARN Meteor or do you want to KNOW Meteor. If your goal is to be able to use Meteor to put together some projects, you could definitely get away with a lot by not knowing JavaScript completely. However Meteor is a framework and things are done the Meteor way (or should be). This means once you go to pick up some JavaScript in the wild you could find yourself lost.

But if you really want to know Meteor then I suggest taking the time to learn programming fundamentals, followed by some JS knowledge, and then it would probably behove you to get and understanding of how Node JS, server technologies work. This will help you solve the intricacies of Meteor when you run into problems (especially when you can not get an answer from this forum and/or stack overflow at times).

Some good resources that I have used myself I think are viable to this are, Team Treehouse - Full Stack JavaScript Coure (about $20 a month), MongoDB University - MongDB for Node JS Developers (FREE!), and Level Up Tuts - Meteor For Everyone (FREE! - but send the guy a donation if you can. he works really hard to provide free content).

I think if you did all three of those, you would be in good shape provided you were able to understand the content.