How Long Does It Take to Learn JavaScript?

Table of Contents

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• Meet Our Expert: Zachary Lynch
• What is JavaScript?
• How Long to Learn JavaScript?
• 1 Day to Learn the Basics of JavaScript
• 3 Months to Achieve JavaScript Mastery
• 5 Years to Reach JavaScript Expertise
• Learning JavaScript at Sabio

For anyone considering a career in tech, learning JavaScript will likely be key to landing your first job. But how long does it really take to learn JavaScript? Zachary Lynch, a Sabio graduate-turned-instructor, lays out the timeline of how long it takes to go from coding newbie to JavaScript mastery. Zach also shares his insights on how much JavaScript you need to learn to land your first developer role, and how Sabio is helping students with the heavy lifting of learning how to code. 

Meet Our Expert: Zachary Lynch

• Zach is a military veteran who completed the Sabio bootcamp. At Sabio, he loved that he could learn to code without enrolling in college and still have incredible career opportunities.
• After graduation, Zach was a full stack engineer for a mortgage marketing company until he returned to Sabio to be an instructor.
• Zach will be an instructor for Sabio’s fundamentals of coding workshops!

What is JavaScript?

JavaScript is a front end language with many libraries that allows users to interact with webpages and applications. 

What is JavaScript typically used for in 2023?

JavaScript allows us to create effective and efficient applications for users to interact with. The majority of what we see on webpages in 2023 are JavaScript. Every time you click a button on a website, JavaScript makes that button do something by running a function whether that’s viewing a profile, adding funds to your bank through a mobile app, or anything else!

How Long to Learn JavaScript?

The TLDR: You can learn the very basics of JavaScript in just one day. If you study for three months, you’ll learn enough about JavaScript to land your first job. And after working in a JavaScript job for five years, you can call yourself a Senior JavaScript Developer. 

1 Day to Learn the Basics of JavaScript

You can learn a lot about JavaScript in one day! The basics of JavaScript includes defining variables which allows us to store data inside of one item (such as an object, an array, or some simple string content, text content, or numbers) that we then put all over the webpage to access and render that data to the user. 

When learning JavaScript basics, you’ll learn about defining functions, which are pre-written code snippets that allow some code to execute based on something, like a user generated event. Defining functions is extremely important — we don't want anything to happen for the user until the user makes that choice. 

• For example, we don't want to login or logout the user until the user clicks that login or logout button. When they click that login or logout button, that's when a function will run.

Objects and arrays are an important fundamental to learn. They enable how we send and receive data from our database to our server to our front end. Objects allow us to store a lot of information inside of what's called properties.

• For example: What we might have as an object is a car. That car has properties: paint, color, amount of seats, amount of wheels, et cetera. That kind of data is stored inside of these objects, which allow us to send and receive this data in a more efficient manner.

An array, or miscellaneous items, are JavaScript objects as well, but they allow us to store a lot of data inside of arrays by their array name. When I store data inside an array, it's given an index position. Then I use that index position to look up the piece of data stored by that number.

3 Months to Achieve JavaScript Mastery

At Sabio, we implement a lot of JavaScript libraries in the curriculum because just knowing how to use a library can get you a job as a developer. We start with basic JavaScript, then introduce the front end library, JQuery, which allows us to manipulate and update the content on the page. 

By the second month of the Sabio coding bootcamp, students are introduced to more advanced JavaScript libraries, such as React, which is one of the most popular libraries there is when it comes to JavaScript. Developed by Facebook, React allows users to store a lot of information in a virtual dom, which only updates when it finds a change on the page, making it very efficient and reusable. It takes a month or two to feel comfortable with React. 

By the time you’re finished at Sabio, you’ll have a ton of marketable experience for employment. By three months in the bootcamp, you can get to a mastery level and land some kind of software engineer or software developer role.

5 Years to Reach JavaScript Expertise

It takes between 3-6 months to reach a mastery level in JavaScript, but keep in mind you’ll need to keep learning, reimplementing your code, and redefining your skills. After learning React, you’ll start implementing more JavaScript libraries, tools, functions, and APIs (application interfaces), which will make you more marketable as a Senior JavaScript Developer. You’ll find yourself using multiple JS libraries to meet the needs of the application, managing a team of developers, and mentoring students about the right way to use JavaScript.

Learning JavaScript at Sabio

Are JavaScript fundamentals covered in Sabio’s free intro coding courses?

In our free, one-day coding workshops, Sabio instructors are here to walk you through coding very slowly to make sure you understand it completely. It feels overwhelming at first, but by week three of the coding bootcamp, it starts making a lot of sense as you learn how to implement it. 

Are these workshops meant for absolute coding beginners?

Yes! You do not need to have any coding experience to learn to code at Sabio. 

Will these workshops give participants an accurate idea of what learning at Sabio is like?

Absolutely — the workshops will be exactly what the lectures in the bootcamp are like. We’ll sit down and type code in front of you and advise you to follow along and code with us in order to integrate muscle memory. Watching videos is one thing, but it’s invaluable to be in-person with an instructor, able to ask questions when you’re stuck and make sure it’s correct before moving on. 

Do you recommend that incoming bootcamp students understand JavaScript fundamentals before enrolling in Sabio?

If you have the capacity to start learning JavaScript before attending a bootcamp, it’ll help, but it’s not necessary! The instructors at Sabio will ensure you understand the fundamentals by taking it slowly the entire way. 

Find out more and read Sabio reviews on Course Report. This article was produced by the Course Report team in partnership with Sabio.