An online book club.. for developers?

I am a software engineer, mostly working in the backend of a desktop application. Although I don't use JS in my daily tasks at work, I've been using it a lot recently as part of my side projects, such as a twitter bot, and through React Native for an app I am developing.

A LOT has changed since I was first introduced to JS during my bachelor's in 2011, and as a result all on my own I was slowly following videos and courses to fill in the gaps. That is, until one day, I was casually scrolling #TechTwitter and saw a tweet by @madisonkanna, talking about a coding book club(@codebookclub)! I immediately jumped on their discord, and what a GREAT community!!

We are now on Chapter 3 of the book You Don't Know JS: Get Started, and we started by reading it for free on Github(https://github.com/getify/You-Dont-Know-JS). Last week we had the absolute pleasure of being joined by the author himself, and he gave all in attendance free ebook copies of his book! At the risk of sounding cliche, I have to say that despite thinking I "knew" Javascript, I gained a much deeper insight from reading this book!

Settling Debates

It was an amazing experience to be able to talk to the author directly, especially knowing he has so many years of experience. While we were supposed to originally speak to him for half an hour and then continue meeting. We all were having such great insight from Kyle that he ended up agreeing to stay the entire hour! It was amazing. In one of our groups we had a discussion about whether or not Javascript really is compiled and if we think that's what kyle really meant to say. Well here was my chance to ask him face to face. Conclusion: He meant what he meant and he said what he said. Javascript is a compiled language. Debate settled!

Symmathesy

One of the biggest benefits for me being apart of the code book club is the sense of community and frankly - peer pressure to continue reading the book every week! Knowing that I had book club coming up on Sunday really made me read and try to understand the chapter before the end of the week. In my own I definitely would not have felt the pressure to continue the way that I did. In addition to that, discussing what we learned together and answering questions and asking questions also help a lot of the material we covered really stick. Kyle brought to our attention that there is actually a word for this style of learning! - Symmathesy.

Conclusion

It has definitely been a positive experience with the codebookclub and it feels amazing to have such a rapport with an online community! Since the inception of the @codebookclub I've had such a positive experience and have been feeding my hunger to learn more! Looking forward to see where we go with this awesome community!