Levels of expertise in JavaScript — Are you ready for the tutorial?

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The following blog is apart of my growing list of guides for teachers and students of online tutorials in web technology. To help judge what a tutorial expects of the reader to know before taking. This time we’re talking about JavaScript, but check out my other guides for HTML and CSS.

JS is a big one, growth in it has just exploded in the past ten years. What used to be a system for adding a sprinkling of logic to a page can now run entire websites, hardware, and 3D games. For this guide, I’m only covering Vanilla JS as it exists on the front end in a browser. Later on, I’ll make other blogs to include more advanced features including various frameworks like React, Vue, as well as the backend side of JavaScript with Node.js.

For this scale, I will use Beginner, Basic, Intermediate, and Advanced to indicate what prior knowledge a student should know before taking on a tutorial. For each level, the student should know or have:

Beginner

• No previous knowledge of JavaScript

Basic JavaScript

• intermediate knowledge of both HTMLand CSS
• variables, and how to declare them
• operators, like +, -, etc.
• functions
• What an API is
• How to access and query the DOM

Intermediate JavaScript

• Loops
• Create and render new elements on to the DOM.
• How and when JS renders on a web page
• Events. How to listen for events and create your own.
• Function and variable scopes, you should know what this is
• Anonymous functions and Immediately Invoked Function Expression (IIFE)
• Browser support for new JS features and how to use polyfills to fill in support when needed

Advanced JavaScript

• How to make an AJAX request
• How to use promises and know when you get data.
• The differences in var, let, and const to declare variables.
• What closures are and how to utilize them
• What Object-Oriented Programming, or OOP, is and how it can happen in Javascript
• Optimization of logic for speed

This blog is only a guideline, of course, there are plenty of cases where some overlap of knowledge will be required. Example being a basic tutorial requiring some intermediate knowledge. For students, just remember Googling for terms you don’t completely understand is encouraged. For educators, it’s not a bad thing to go into more detail on what you think might be necessary knowledge.