full stack roadmap (for self-study)
Welcome to the 16-week course to fullstack development. Even if you're not part of neogcamp you can still use this extensive roadmap as a signpost to learn individual items listed.
opinions
This is an opinionated guide. I have spent 8+ years in this industry and worked in the ReactJS ecosystem. This guide favors React, favors hooks over classes (doesn't even mention classes), favors what I think is good to learn, and thus, is opinionated. It doesn't give you the choice.
I have made this entire course structure from three things:
- Personal experience.
- Opinions from thought leaders.
- Feedback from startup CEOs who hire from roc8.careers.
principles
Below are the principles, in order, used in making decisions while curating this roadmap.
- Focus on building basics. Basics go long term. They don't change every year.
- Less magic. When choosing between multiple frameworks, choose which does less so that you understand the basics more.
- Understand why you're using something. More than the APIs concentrate on concepts. APIs can be looked up online.
- Should be in the industry for the long term. Whatever is there from long will stay for long. New should be learned later.
- Choose libraries or concepts which can be used across platforms.
- Follow best practices from the beginning to build the right foundation.
- Learn as little as possible. Learn to build full-stack apps. Don't try everything now.
- Get ready for interviews. Interviews are a tad bit different than day to day programming, I can't change that, so accepting that and getting ready for it is part of the roadmap.
prerequisite
You should follow this 16-week roadmap only after you have done the 5-week course of levelZero which covers the basics of
- HTML5,
- CSS
- Basic JS Programming
- vanillaJS in browser
- Git, Github, VSCode
- React Basics
The videos are up on youtube and are free to consume. 500+ students have completed and made their portfolios within 5 weeks. Please see the levelZero guide to get started.
CSS Advanced I
We will continue where we left in levelZero and learn some more CSS to make your apps better:
- responsive design
- flex
- grid
- positioning
Philosophy for learning CSS
: Don't learn any library, any framework. First, learn and practice the basics as much as possible. Once you have made 5 full apps with pure CSS you will never have problems with CSS. Most of the devs, including me, have made the mistake of jumping to a framework and then lacking in the basics.
Stretch goal for CSS learning: Publish your component library after this camp.
Getting ready for React
- functional programming in JS
- Async JS
- ES6+
- mock server for API calls
React I
- useEffect
- understanding side effects
- setup and teardown
- dependency array
- doing AJAX calls
- gotchas
- rules to follow
React II
- useContext
- using it for sharing global state
- React Debugger
React III
- Code clarity with useReducer
- Error Boundaries
React Router
- SPAs and routing
- Setting up Router
- Using links
- URL Parameters/Query Parameters
- Redirects
- "active" link
- 404
- programmatic navigation
Backend server
Philosophy for backend
: Learn only for making APIs. CDN takes care of the file serving.JSX and React takes care of the templating. Don't learn what is not needed in full-stack dev flow anymore.
Note: This one is going to be a long weekend :)
Writing RESTful API
- what's REST?
- HTTP methods for REST services
- Organising API endpoints
- Good naming convention for RESTful services
- HTTP Status codes
- 2xx: Success
- 3xx: Redirection
- 4xx: Client Error
- 5xx: Server Error
- versioning in REST
ExpressJS
- Hello world!
- basic routing
- response types
- handling POST data
- advanced routing
- arranging by routes
- parameters
- middleware
- hosting an app in prod
- exception handling
- cors
Database
- Understanding data modeling.
- ORM (Object Relational Mapper)
- intro to mongo and sequelize
- Hosting a MongoDB instance on cloud
- Mongoose
- basics
- schema
- relationships
- CRUD
- mongoose promises
- integration with Express
User authentication
- how login works
- login with React + React Router on FE
- JWT, handling token with Express
- Writing your own middleware
- Authenticated routes on the backend
Coding practices II
- What are types?
- Why Typescript and how it helps at scale?
- Setting up TS in your app
- Introduction to Typescript
- Using Typescript with React
CSS Advanced II
- specificity, cascade
- animation
- transitions
- floats
JS for Interviews
We will have a detailed curriculum here which will go deep into how JS works. Questions which are asked in interviews test the understanding of language:
- scope
- closures
- performance
- debounce and throttle
- setTimeout
- DSA in javaScript
This part is still in the works. This is going to be comprehensive. But you get the idea, we prepare you for interviews from here.