By Gergely Orosz, the author of The Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter and Building Mobile Apps at Scale
Navigating senior, tech lead, staff and principal positions at tech companies and startups. An Amazon #1 Best Seller. New: the hardcover is out! As is the audibook. Now available in 6 languages.
In summary, “The Complete JavaScript Course 2020” is less about the year 2020 and more about completeness . It is the textbook you keep on your shelf long after the class ends. While you will need to supplement it with newer tooling and TypeScript, the core JavaScript knowledge you gain will never expire. It is arguably the best investment a new developer can make in their fundamental skills.
You need to learn React or Vue next week, or you only care about AI-assisted coding and not the underlying logic.
This essay argues that the enduring value of this course lies not in its "newness" (which has since aged), but in its to teaching JavaScript as a true language, not just a collection of frameworks. 1. The “How” vs. The “Why” (Fundamentals First) The most common trap for beginner developers is "tutorial hell"—memorizing syntax without understanding execution. The 2020 course excels by dedicating significant time to the weird parts of JavaScript: hoisting, scoping, the this keyword, prototypal inheritance, and event loops.
In the fast-paced world of web development, a course titled with a specific year— “The Complete JavaScript Course 2020: Build Real Projects!” —might initially seem like outdated content. After all, JavaScript ES2020 introduced features like BigInt , Promise.allSettled , and the optional chaining operator ( ?. ). However, to dismiss this course because of its publication year would be a significant mistake. In fact, Jonas Schmedtmann’s 2020 edition represents a pinnacle of technical education: a perfect balance between modern syntax, fundamental problem-solving, and the timeless logic of programming.
The book is separated into six standalone parts, each part covering several chapters:
Parts 1 and 6 apply to all engineering levels: from entry-level software developers to principal or above engineers. Parts 2, 3, 4 and 5 cover increasingly senior engineering levels. These four parts group topics in chapters – such as ones on software engineering, collaboration, getting things done, and so on.
This book is more of a reference book that you can refer back to, as you grow in your career. I suggest skimming over the career levels and chapters that you are familiar with, and focus reading on topics you struggle with, or career levels where you are aiming to get to. Keep in mind that expectations can vary greatly between companies.
In this book, I’ve aimed to align the topics and leveling definitions closer to what is typical at Big Tech and scaleups: but you might find some of the topics relevant for lower career levels in later chapters. For example, we cover logging, montiroing and oncall in Part 5: “Reliable software systems” in-depth: but it’s useful – and oftentimes necessary! – to know about these practices below the staff engineer levels.
The Software Engineer's Guidebook is available in multiple languages:
You should now be able to ask your local book shops to order the book for you via Ingram Spark Print-on-demand - using the ISBN code 9789083381824. I'm also working on making the paperback more accessible in additional regions, including translated versions. Please share details here if you're unable to get the book in your country and I'll aim to remedy the situation.
I'd like to think so! The book can help you get ideas on how to help software engineers on your team grow. And if you are a hands-on engineering manager (which I hope you might be!) then you can apply the topics yourself! I wrote more about staying hands-on as an engineering manager or lead in The Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter.
I've gotten this variation of a question from Data Engineers, ML Engineers, designers and SREs. See the more detailed table of contents and the "Look inside" sample to get a better idea of the contents of the book. I have written this book with software engineers as the target group, and the bulk of the book applies for them. Part 1 is more generally applicable career advice: but that's still smaller subset of the book.