I recently did an online course called Fulcrum with Hackreactor and this is my small reflection about it.

1) Structure

Students were given functions to write, the original documentation, and their respective tests. This is great because it gave us a hands-on experience with documentation and test suite reading. For instance, we had to manipulate the test code to our needs to figure out what went wrong.

2) Native methods

Our first task was to write out all sorts of key basic functions such as Math.max, array pop join, and string slice. This exercise is great for three reasons. First, it truly felt like we were understanding programming from the ground-up. No external functions were allowed. Second, the exercise really forces you to become good/creative at lower-level functions, such as looping, setting conditions, etc. Third, we spent enough time with each function that we knew them by heart.

3) Underscore library

“Underscore is a JavaScript library that provides a whole mess of useful functional programming helpers without extending any built-in objects.”

Next, we had to implement some of the key functions in the underscore library. The toughest part about it, I argue, are probably higher order functions. Writing them out required you to constantly keep track of what is being passed to what. This gets easier over time with practice, but the initiation process still took me by surprise.

There are also other material such as recursion, frontend, and prototypal stuff, in which I won’t get into, but overall, I really felt like the course provided very solid understanding of the language and program in general for me.