First thing I should say…better for me! I found the Udemy course annoying and tedious. I don’t mean to sound intolerant, but someone who speaks my language in my tongue is much less of a distraction. Big surprise, the course is from MicroSoft. It does say for absolute beginners, so perhaps it might be very basic in the beginning, however I am going to take a chance because I’ve given up so many times trying to learn a seemingly easy language. Also I can play the video at a faster speed if I want to. I think I’ve seen this course before and just assumed it might center around MicroSoft’s Typescript. Now the instructor stresses that this is Javascript…Typescript wasn’t mentioned.
Another plus…for me is although I like for example Brad Traversy, I find dealing with a browser to learn…annoying. And most of these video tutorials run/test the code in a browser…usually Google! Every time I begin I have to start VSCode, then resize it so I can put the browser next to it by resizing the browser! What a pain when all I want to do is learn Javascript!
Now this course…at least early on…uses node.js and you just run the code in a terminal window below your code. I do think he uses a browser later in the course. Quite honestly at least early on (and I may be very unique in this regard) I’m more likely to play with Javascript outside a browser in node.js. Because (and I’ve said this often) at this time I’m really really not interested in web design. Now I’m almost sure that most people want to learn Javascript exactly for that reason…web design!
So why bother with Javascript at all? Because it is a very popular language. Because of this I’m assuming there a a lot of libraries. Libraries mean a possible solution to many potential problems. It could be a very useful scripting language! Also although I’m not very interested in web design, I could still see myself using it in a browser if I got comfortable with the syntax. I would more likely use it for checking input rather than making things pretty. It would be much easier to jump into using it in a browser if I already knew the syntax.