Top JavaScript Libraries & Tech to Learn in 2018
Which Topics Should You Study?
Like last year, you can’t go wrong focusing on the essentials, but you should place more emphasis on functional programming for React apps.
React is great for two primary reasons:
- Deterministic view renders
- Abstracting the view layer away from direct DOM manipulation
Determinism is best served by building applications using pure functions, which is essentially the definition of functional programming.
With that in mind, here are some topics you should study:
- Basic ES6 syntax
- Class syntax and its many pitfalls — It’s OK to use
classfor React components, but avoid extending from your own classes, avoidinstanceof, and avoid forcing users of your classes to use thenewkeyword. - Functional programming & software composition
- Currying
- Closures
- Pure functions
- Promises
- Generators & async functions
- TDD
- The RAIL performance model
- Progressive Web Applications (PWAs): See “Native Apps are Doomed” & “Why Native Apps Really Are Doomed”
- GraphQL matured a lot in 2017, and is quickly taking over from REST APIs. Apollo is adding built-in offline first client cache architecture that will make Apollo+GraphQL a serious alternative (or complement) to Redux in 2018.
Libraries & Tools
These are the libraries and tools I’m finding most useful:
- React
- Redux
- Redux-Saga to manage async I/O and isolate side-effects
- Next.js — SSR with Node & Express, automatic bundle splitting, styled-jsx
- Material UI
- Storybook
- Cheerio for unit testing React components (I prefer this over Enzyme)
- Lodash (I prefer utilities from
lodash/fp). Import just the utilities you need to avoid blowing up your bundle size. - Babel: Used to compile ES6 to work on older browsers.
- Webpack: The most popular bundler for standard JavaScript look for simple starter kit/boilerplate config examples to get things running fast)
- ESLint: Catch syntax errors and style issues early. After code review and TDD, the third best thing you can do to reduce bugs in your code.
- Ramda — mostly for lenses and transducers.
- Node & Express
- RxJS: Observables for JavaScript. I’ve been using transducers more, lately. Remember to use pipeable operators to avoid blowing up your bundle size.
TypeScript did well in 2017, but I’ve seen it get in the way and complicate apps more than it helped. It’s primary shortcomings are over reliance on annotations as opposed to inference, and an inability to properly type higher-order functions without indescribable contortions. I gave it a full-time daily trial for a while, but these still apply: “The Shocking Secret About Static Types” &“You Might Not Need TypeScript”. Flow shares the same problems and the developer tools are not as good as TypeScript’s.
Tech to Watch in 2018
All of these areas of R&D are creating real jobs in 2018:
- Progressive Web Apps (PWAs)
- Blockchain & fintech
- Medical technology
- AR/VR — Hololens, Meta, and ODG are shipping today. ODG R-9 was scheduled to ship in 2017 but will likely ship in 2018 instead. MagicLeap has promised to ship in 2018. AR will transform the human experience more than the cell phone did.
- 3D printing
- AI
- Drones
Quantum computing is also poised to transform the world, but it may be 2019 or later before the disruption really starts. There are working quantum computers online, but they can’t do much yet. It’s still too early for most developers to even begin to experiment productively. Microsoft recently announced its Q# programming language for quantum computing. Meanwhile, IBM and Google also continue to invest heavily to own the embryonic cloud quantum computing market.
If you want to be prepared to learn quantum computing, you’ll want to study up on linear algebra. There are also functional explorations of quantum computing based on lambda calculus.
It’s likely that, as we’ve seen with AI, cloud APIs will be developed that will let people with less math background take advantage of some of the capabilities of quantum computing.
출처 : https://medium.com/javascript-scene/top-javascript-libraries-tech-to-learn-in-2018-c38028e028e6
