Can I Learn JavaScript in 3 Months?

Learning a programming language is like learning any other language: there are degrees of ability. Few people, even expert JavaScript developers, have learned JavaScript completely, being versed in all its techniques, able to write any kind of application, and understanding all its implementations. For one reason, JavaScript is still expanding, with new features added in updates and new libraries created to expand its functionality. 

Learning JavaScript to the highest expert level certainly takes more than three months. A more reasonable estimate might be several years of active and varied study and coding. Even learning enough to be considered a professional JavaScript programmer could take from several months to a year. At best, a professional training program can prepare you for entry-level employment using JavaScript in about three months, if it is a full-time, accelerated course taught by a skilled instructor. You will also progress faster if you are a dedicated student with some prior coding experience. Beyond classwork, though, you will need experience with real coding projects to improve further. Studying more JavaScript libraries and tools will also expand your knowledge and capabilities, whether done through advanced coursework or practical experience.

Regardless of the training method, three months of committed study is usually enough to give you a strong grasp of JavaScript and start writing useful code and applications in the language. In this time, you could easily become a confident amateur user, either through guided instruction or by using prewritten lessons and self-guided study. Three months is also long enough to understand JavaScript’s varied uses and decide whether you want to pursue advanced study and a related career. In fact, with the help of some faster-paced courses like bootcamps, you could reach this same degree of competence in two months or less, with time for further practice or an additional short advanced course. Depending on your career plans, a bootcamp could even teach you enough JavaScript to start working at an entry-level position.

How Much JavaScript Can I Learn in 3 Months 

In three months, a diligent student could learn JavaScript’s complete syntax, most necessary programming techniques, some commonly used libraries like Node.js and React, and even several advanced techniques. For most coders, these skills are sufficient to build useful projects like animated content, user interfaces, and plug-in applications for websites, simple mobile applications, or server-based applications for websites. This proficiency is also usually enough to secure entry-level employment in JavaScript-intensive fields like web design and front end web development, especially for students with additional related skills like graphic design, user interface design, and web content creation. Reaching this level in three months is most likely for students who take a full-time professional training course with live instruction, since they can work at the fastest possible pace without distractions or delays. Students taking self-paced, prerecorded lessons might be able to achieve entry-level professional skill in three months, given a high-quality course and frequent, dedicated study, but this path is more challenging.

However, even a hard-working student in an excellent course would have trouble mastering some aspects of JavaScript within three months. Some programming techniques, such as asynchronous functions (functions that wait for a delayed event), memoization (a technique for optimizing performance by storing results from repeated functions), and components (reusable custom code blocks) require further study and practice. Learning unfamiliar libraries takes time to fully understand the objects and functions they contain. Depending on the focus of a student’s original studies, transitioning to a different JavaScript environment (e.g. from website coding to mobile application design) can also require further study. Three months of study can give a student the knowledge necessary to start learning these advanced skills, but cannot cover all the tools needed for every programming job. 

For students taking slower courses and using slower study methods, such as part-time study or self-paced learning, three months may not be enough time to acquire even entry-level programming skill. Within three months, part-time courses can give students a strong foundation in JavaScript, but cannot cover some techniques or address multiple project types. For example, a JavaScript bootcamp, if taken part-time, will usually last ten to twelve weeks and only avoids running longer by focusing on fewer specific uses of JavaScript, typically front end web development. A complete professional certificate program in JavaScript, if taken part-time, typically runs from five to six months, and taken as multiple, separate, shorter classes, would require at least as long in total, if not longer.

Students who are delayed by other difficulties, such as unclear lessons, a lack of feedback, or distractions will also take longer to learn both early and intermediate concepts and will not reach many advanced techniques. For these reasons, free resources like tutorial videos and texts will generally teach the least within three months. With free resources, it should be possible to understand JavaScript’s general structure and gain enough basic programming proficiency to manage simple scripts, but learning libraries and advanced methods will take much longer. 

Self-paced learning using purchased pre-recorded lessons could move students ahead faster than free lessons but is still unlikely to convey entry-level professional skill in three months. Self-paced learning slows down as students encounter more challenging problems, particularly as they begin working on advanced programming techniques and longer projects. Debugging and evaluating practice projects is particularly difficult in this format. It is also more difficult to judge progress and readiness without an instructor’s evaluation. Again, three months of self-paced study can certainly cover all the basics of JavaScript and get a student started writing code, even working on useful projects, but this amount of time is unlikely to prepare them for a career or to write professional-quality code.

How Can I Learn JavaScript More Quickly?

The surest method to accelerate one’s JavaScript studies is to enroll in a fast-paced, full-time live course like a bootcamp or professional training program. These live courses focus specifically on JavaScript, unlike college or vocational degree programs that are usually designed around a profession and include additional subjects and skills. While useful, this additional study does slow down these programs and delay their completion. Compared to degree programs, full-time training courses also typically meet more frequently and for longer class sessions, compressing more lessons into a shorter time frame. This intensive schedule helps students maintain their focus and motivation, leaving them less downtime to become distracted or forget prior material. Live courses also provide fast feedback, avoiding delays due to unanswered questions, unnoticed errors, or knowledge gaps. Combining live class sessions with additional readings, exercises, and projects outside of class further boosts students’ progress. Live training courses, then, help students become fluent in JavaScript most quickly, working on advanced skills and projects sooner.

Students who cannot enroll in full-time classes will progress more slowly, but can still speed their studies in other ways. On-demand classes using written lessons and pre-recorded videos can be studied whenever a student is available and could be completed rapidly even on an irregular schedule. Here, the determining factor is each student’s dedication and persistence. While on-demand classes do not offer immediate feedback, many on-demand schools do provide limited contact with instructors, via message boards, chats, or video or phone calls. Learning how to research answers on their own can also help students to overcome delays. If students can overcome difficulties and avoid distractions, on-demand courses can potentially progress as fast as live classes, especially for introductory JavaScript courses. However, advanced JavaScript coursework increases the challenges of on-demand study, making such rapid progress more difficult.

All class types can be advanced further faster by taking advantage of supplemental resources, including free tutorials. Viewing several introductory tutorials before starting a JavaScript course will give a student better familiarity and additional perspective that will improve their understanding of early lessons. Reading or watching additional tutorials while taking a formal class similarly provides alternate descriptions and extra examples that ensure they fully understand each topic and do not fall behind. Many websites provide sample projects and coding challenges of varying difficulty to test and improve programmers’ JavaScript skills. Completing these challenges will improve students’ abilities faster, increase the benefit of subsequent lessons, and add projects to their portfolio, which can provide useful reference examples for later study and improve their employment prospects. If a student truly enjoys coding, challenges can even be fun puzzles and topics for discussion with other programmers! Finally, if a student’s budget only allows study with free resources, the best recommendation to speed up their JavaScript studies is variety: don’t rely on just one source. Work through multiple lessons to get alternate explanations, more practice, and a basis for comparison to avoid missing or incorrect information.

What JavaScript Skills Will I Need to Learn After 3 Months?

At best, three months is enough to learn the basics of JavaScript programming and enough advanced skills to qualify for professional coding work in certain fields. This estimate assumes an intensive, full-time professional training program, either through live classes or dedicated study with self-paced lessons. By this time, students will be aware how much more there is to learn. Certain advanced JavaScript techniques are difficult for even experienced programmers, requiring careful thought and plenty of practice to master. JavaScript has many available libraries, frameworks, and other tools, and an initial course can only cover a few of the most common or necessary tools. Initial courses also cannot address every possible use of JavaScript. Most courses focus on a single career path, like web development or mobile app development. Learning about a different use of JavaScript requires more study to address the concepts, concerns, techniques, and tools specific to that work.

Advanced JavaScript courses typically address one or more of these extended topics. Some courses are designed around specific types of projects and products, teaching the additional skills professionals will need to work in that area. Often, these topical courses also introduce useful non-JavaScript skills, such as Git, a tool for collaborative programming, or user interaction (UI) design, which helps developers build better applications. For example, a course on video game development in JavaScript might touch on principles of game design, methods for coding highly responsive game controls, and animation and object programming for game sprites. These advanced studies will progress a programmer’s output from abstract, isolated code to complete, practical projects, valuable not only for securing employment but also for independent product development. 

Other advanced courses either introduce several related libraries or development tools or else teach a specific tool or framework in great depth. Common examples are libraries like React (for building user interfaces for applications), frameworks like Angular (for web applications), or application programming interfaces (APIs) like Maps (for map components and applications). Early studies should give students the understanding to quickly add these tools to their repertoire; each advanced course further expands their skills and increases their efficiency. Finally, certain advanced courses are designed for general advancement, teaching challenging techniques like object-oriented programming, optimization methods for faster code execution, or improved security within JavaScript (needed especially for back end web development). Regardless of profession, all JavaScript students can benefit from these courses, as they are less specific to project types and cover methods that make JavaScript easier to use and more productive overall.

Learn JavaScript with Noble Desktop

Noble Desktop offers three courses on JavaScript, each focusing on its use in web development. These courses are designed to meet the needs of different students and vary correspondingly in length. The shortest of these classes, JavaScript for Front-End, can be completed in about three full days. This introductory class teaches JavaScript centered around its uses in front end web development. The course does request that students have some prior experience with HTML and CSS, ideally from studying web design or front end web development. From this basis, the instructor will explain how JavaScript adds to the functionality of websites, teach the language’s terminology and syntax, and demonstrate its core programming techniques. The second half of the course teaches GreenSock, an animation platform for JavaScript that simplifies animated website components. The course includes a proprietary workbook, awards a certificate upon completion, and may be retaken once for free within one year.

Noble Desktop’s JavaScript Programming Bootcamp is a more complete, career-focused course in JavaScript, also centered on its uses in web development. This course also requests that students have prior web design or web development experience. This bootcamp is accelerated, but its thorough curriculum still requires several weeks of full-time study. During this time, students progress from the basic concepts and features of JavaScript programming through increasingly complex techniques and tools, including additions from the most recent JavaScript releases. Throughout this study, students work on sample projects of increasing complexity, with their finished projects suitable for a starting portfolio. The course also addresses common JavaScript-related interview questions and provides additional career guidance, including a 1-on-1 mentoring session with an instructor. The bootcamp includes supplemental workbooks, access to class recordings, and a certificate of completion. Students can also retake the class once for free for up to a year.

The longest and most complete of Noble Desktop’s JavaScript courses is the JavaScript Development Certificate program, a comprehensive program running for 14 weeks for full-time study. This course is a complete, career-oriented study program that prepares students for professional work using JavaScript. Its main focus is web development, and students should have prior experience coding in HTML and CSS for web design or development. The first part of this certificate program is identical to Noble Desktop’s JavaScript Programming Bootcamp, training students to write basic, ‘vanilla’ JavaScript. The course then progresses through advanced units on JavaScript coding for websites, including the Node.js, Express.js, and React libraries, the MongoDB database management system, and techniques for coding security and user interface functions. The course also includes a bonus unit on SQL, a data management language used in many websites. Finally, the course prepares students for job applications by building a portfolio of course projects and practicing sample interview questions. Each student also receives eight 1-on-1 mentoring sessions with an instructor to further refine their career plans or address any difficult course topics. The program includes supplemental written materials and access to all class recordings. Students receive a NY State-Licenced certificate upon completion and can retake the course once for free for up to one year.