> In the software world, when you go the other way you notice how all the blog posts, online help is not really helpful at all. They assume you'd only ever go A -> B.

I was already a competent programmer when I learnt JavaScript. There's very little out there for someone in this position.

I decided to learn guitar after playing piano for 10+ years. There's nothing for people who already know notes and a reasonable amount of theory.

There probably aren't many books or courses for an experienced programmer learning Java, either. Python might be tough, too.

So true. Which ones did you end up using and enjoying the most ?

I'm afraid I don't really have a good answer, I don't think I ever encountered a decent JavaScript for programmers tutorial.

The Mozilla documentation on JavaScript, and (slightly less so) the w3schools.com documentation, are pretty good for reference, but they aren't tutorials. They're not up to the standard of, say, the .Net documentation, but they're still pretty good.

Perhaps one of these 3 will be of help to you: https://eloquentjavascript.net/ https://leanpub.com/javascriptallongesix https://github.com/getify/You-Dont-Know-JS

The first one clearly isn't intended for already competent programmers.

The focus of the second one doesn't seem to be on teaching the JavaScript language. [0]

The third one looks like the best bet, but it's still not explicitly aimed at an audience of already competent programmers. [1]

[0] https://leanpub.com/javascriptallongesix/read#leanpub-auto-a...

[1] https://github.com/getify/You-Dont-Know-JS/blob/2nd-ed/get-s...

axel rauschmayer's books are pretty good: https://exploringjs.com/

(edit: a more direct link: https://exploringjs.com/impatient-js/toc.html)

I remember learning the fairly deep == type-inference algorithm by reading something he wrote, but I don't recall which thing it was in. A lot of the material is suitable as reference, so I haven't sat down and read much like a novel.

Heroku is great but I find it too expensive for hobby projects. I recently converted a small hobby project on a $5/mo VPS to lambda and api gateway and it now costs about $1/mo unless it gets more traffic.

Yes, I can afford to pay a lot more, but I don’t want to and I’m willing to invest more time into something to save money if the process is repeatable.

Lately this has been writing cloud formation that can easily be copied between projects. I wish it was easier though.

I find CDK[1] way easier to deal with than CloudFormation yaml or json. Try it out!

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/cdk/

Heroku is so great. We recently had to move away from it due to very high HIPAA compliance pricing, but the AWS setup with Beanstalk is much more cumbersome.

Heroku (and its open source cousin Cloud Foundry) just have the right abstraction level and very easy to use tooling.

Not sure if it's still an issue, but we used to have a nightmarish time with Beanstalk where deployments would hang and we'd have no choice but to deploy a second instance of our app, flip DNS over, etc. I seem to recall it was some CloudFormation thing under the hood. Never had that kinda pain in my brief time with Heroku.

The 10m rows limit and dynos shutting down was the reason I switched out from heroku to linode+dokku. Dokku is super close to being as simple as heroku but self hosted open source.

I would imagine at least some of the price increase was DTO...

AWS to Heroku is like going from Sugar to Chocolate cake. It's still made with Sugar. Try Apache. The config is XML. How much simpler can people make it?