What skills should I have basic knowledge of to learn Meteor successfully?

help
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I’ve hit a wall in developing my app, and I feel it’s because I’m lacking something.

I know HTML/CSS and basic JavaScript.

Should I look into jQuery, Node and Mongo? What do you guys recommend to help in my Meteor skill progression?

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JUST DO IT. u will learn something when doing your work

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I think it’s really important to have a sense for ‘async’ in general. Meteor does a good job abstracting it, but it really will help you a lot to know what’s going on. I think you should build a very simple app (like a todo app or something) in express. Express is extremely basic and simple, but it will force you to ‘think async’ by default.

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@tylerzika : In order to be successful with meteor, I believe one should be really good at javascript. A year ago, when I was in the same situation, I started improving my JavaScript skills. My meteor skills have improved a lot because of it.

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async javascript and than realize that we are modeling/working with data. That UI view part is just tip of the iceberg.

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I have a friend in a similar situation, it’s his javascript knowledge that limits what he can do with meteor.

practice writing things not just in meteor, but in the node eco system.

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You may need to improve you javascript skills with javascript books. The “you don’t know JS” serie is very good, start with “up & going” then “this & Object prototype” "types and grammar “scope and closure” in no particular order.
I would recommend to keep “async & performance” and “es6 and beyond” for later since it will not really help for core meteor programming.

I don’t think learning Jquery, Node or async could be useful at this point.

Basic - intermediate Mongo could sure help, but i think this can be learned by doing.

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What do you need to know?

If you already know HTML and CSS then I would recommend getting comfortable with a CSS framework. Both Bootstrap and Materialize have packages on atmosphere. If you don’t know one already I’d spend 10 - 20 hours on just the framework trying to get to they point where you don’t need to think or google around to get the layout of your app set up.

Next, you need to get your JavaScript up to speed. How to Learn JavaScript Properly has two different guides to follow for beginners and experienced dev that I like. The main thing is to actually write the code out. Reading won’t cement things in your mind.

Get familiar with JSON and how to properly access the key value pairs even in nested structures. With MongoDB I would aim to be comfortable with basic queries, sorting and limiting fields.

With those down you can really start making strides with Meteor. Beyond that I would:

  • Learn Spacebars
  • Read Meteors documentation
  • Go through some tutorials and check out some books.
  • Get familiar with Meteor packages like Iron router and the accounts package
  • Study the code of existing meteor projects to get an idea of how experience developers structure things. Think about why they might choose to do something one way and not another.
  • Write lots of code

Hope that helps :smile:

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For really getting to grips with javascript I recomend http://addyosmani.com/resources/essentialjsdesignpatterns/book/ :slight_smile:

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