Learning Vue.js 2

By Olga Filipova

I was able to finish reading the book yesterday, and compare to the other Packt books that I had read in the past I felt this was the most entertaining of the books so far. I blame the author as I find her goofy, and I liked that. It keeps things interesting, instead of monotone.

Last I left off, I was finishing up the Vuex store, and sadly I still felt a little confused with some of the more detail parts like why did she used a list of names of methods for actions and getters (hard to explain without showing the content). I may need to reread the chapter with the spots I was feeling lost.

The next chapter I was excited about, and that is making your own plugins. It did started on how to use an existing plugin, and the author used Vue Resources which at this time is now deprecated and it is recommended to use another plugin such as Axios or Fetch. I already understood how to use existing plugins; she already did that with Vuex as Vue does not come with the state store out of the box. Instead, I was most excited when she was demonstrating how to make your own plugin by making a sound meter with the Pomodoro application. At this point most of the subject matter with Vue is going to be new for me, and this is where I just dived into the book and kept reading like no tomorrow.

Testing had been a subject with any software development I severely lack, but I want to dive right into the deep end of the pool of knowledge to learn how to utilize unit testing and end-to-end testing. There was so much to take in for me, and I realize the author was trying to make sure the topic was handed to you in small chunks. It may take more than just rereading the chapter; I may have to watch a few video courses, and the whole kit and kaboodle. Nonetheless, with my current Vue and upcoming React project I want to get into doing these testings to make sure things work.

Finally, deployment, and this was another exciting subject matter as I got to learn a little bit about Travis CI and Heroku. Travis CI, for my understanding, is a way to make sure deployment goes smoothly with deployment testing from source to github (or any repository if applicable). Heroku I barely touched on prior to reading, and that is a platform to launch your applications for free. I was planning to use Heroku for launching my server, for my Vue project, to allow easier CORS interaction between the server and the third-part REST APIs.

I wish more authors would had this sense of fun and quirkiness with the Packt books as most of the ones I read had left me dreading to continue just for the sake of finishing the book. I just can not drop a book, good or bad.

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In the meantime I decided to pick up an audio book to read during the car ride from and to work and home, and when I feel like taking a walk. At first I was unable to decide a book that I wanted to read. I had a few audio books that I picked up from Humble Bundle book bundles, but none I wanted to read at the moment. Then it dawned on me that there was a book that I did wanted to read for some time, but I have not purchased yet. I looked up the book on a borrowing app called Hoopla (might want to check your nearest library to see if they support either Hoopla or Overdrive), and it was available!

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Learning How to Learn

By Barbara Oakley PhD, Terrence Sejnowski PhD, Alistair McConville

When I saw the book on Hoopla, I did not realized it was meant to be for kids or teenagers, but as I listened through the chapters I felt anyone can learn from this book that want to improve their learning skills. I wanted to intently pay attention to the book, but it does get hard when you try to maneuver your car around morning and rush hour traffic, but in this case sometimes the slow moving traffic is a good way to get more time to listen to an audiobook.

Maybe i’ll write something about how I feel about wasting so much time driving when you can be more productive.

Funny as I was listening to this chapter about procrastination was one of the methods that someone should do when needing to work, but want to do something relaxing: Pomodoro Technique. Here I am thinking about the Vue book, and one of the applications is making a Pomodoro Timer, and it made me laugh a little noticing the coincidence connection between the two books. What are the odds?

I did find myself relating to scenarios as I listened to the audio book; for example, the idea of working memory is more like a “book bag” and long term memory as a “school locker”. With working/short term memory you can immediately remember items quickly and easily, but you can only stuff so much “books” (thoughts) into your “book bag” while long term memory you can store so much items, but it can be out of reach much like “walking back to your school locker”. I remembered a time when I had to relearn jQuery after using Angular for so long. Once I started working with the JavaScript library it all came back to me slowly but surely.

The only times that I was not paying much attention was anytime the author brought up the nerve cells. Do not get me wrong, I am fascinated with the power of the Brain and the Nervous System, and it is nice to learn how it functions, but I wanted to read this book to find ways I can improve my learning skills, and I felt this is irrelevant. For example, one of the chapters talked about how you can remember what you had learned when you go to sleep, but most of the time it talked about the “little space aliens” (nerve cells) inside you communicating with each other by sparking each others’ “feet” (Dendrite). It was hard for me to pay attention which was sad as I felt I would be interested in the subject, and at the end I can barely remember it.

I been using metaphors through this section of my book report, and the book had mentioned using and making your own to help study. Some of the metaphors I found in this book silly at times like the “space aliens” for nerve cells, but some do make sense with the “pinball” analogy, and I am not being biased as I used to play pinball in the past.

So far, I had been enjoying the book, and I pondered if I should purchase this book in the near future once I have a little bear cub of my own.

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