18 Resources on ES6 for JavaScript Developers

by Alex Ivanovs on June 18, 2015 in Web Development

It’s official, the long wait is finally over, as ECMAScript 6 has been approved as a new standard. The anticipation for this approval has been running wild in the community for months, and years for others. While the evolutionary progress of the language was slow at first, the last few years have seen an incredible growth rate.

A lot of developers and developer publications out there have started to write more concisely about the ES6 standard, and what kind of changes one can expect. The new standard is known under the names of ECMAScript 2015, ES6, and JavaScript Harmony — so keep an eye out for these names in the coming weeks on your favorite developer blogs and news sites.

We won’t be taking a closer look at any code in this post (here’s a raw example of what JavaScript looks like these days), but we will be listing out the best resources on the web currently for learning more about ES6, and how to start using it in your projects today. Books and individual articles are listed at the bottom of the roundup, whilst tools/learning materials are on top. Let us know if you’ve written tutorials of your own that you’d like to see added to this list!

②ality

2ality is a JavaScript blog run by Axel Rauschmayer, and covers topics on web development, mobile development, mostly within the JavaScript ecosphere. For the last few years, Axel has been sharing a ton of stuff on ECMAScript 6 and how to use it in your JavaScript projects on daily basis. His blog is also a good starting place to meeting people who are passionate about ES6 and have already adopted it fully. Later in the post, we will take a look at a book that Axel recently published, also about ES6.

ES Discuss

The ES Discuss site provides a neatly organized list of ECMAScript Discussion Archives that come directly from the Mozilla Mailing list. I don’t think there is a standalone search feature available, so you’ll have to rely on Google to find stuff that you need help with, want to explore more about.

ES6 In Depth Articles

They started producing these back in April, and they’ve quickly turned into one of the most resourceful pieces of content available for ES6 at the moment. Some of the recent articles go into detail about using templates, generators, and symbols — with plenty of comments for each piece to keep you busy for hours.

ES6 Interactive Guide

I’m not quite sure what is meant by the “interactive guide” part, but the design of the website does have a certain appeal. This resource looks at the major parts of ES6 and how to approach them, plenty of code examples to engrave the changes in your mind forever.

ECMAscript 6 Lessons

At the moment there are 12 different video casts available, each lasting a few minutes, explaining the basics of ES6, and below the each video there is a live console that you can use to play around with the code. Not all videos are free, but if you’re a video learner, this might be the place to go.

ECMAScript 6 Compatibility

Now that ECMAScript 6 is the official standard, how are browsers going to keep up with the demand? This GitHub page is the perfect solution for analyzing the progress of browsers on the new standard, and what to expect in terms of features and updates.

Learn ES2015

Babel by itself is a JavaScript compiler for ES6, and they’ve built a specific page for documenting all the great ES6 features in one place. And while it is neatly organized, the original seems to be coming from this GitHub repository.

ES6 Katas

I think it is relatively easy to treat programming as a martial art, it’s a long-life practice and there’s always more to learn, describing that a kata is a system of individual training exercises for practitioners of karate and other martial arts. That’s what this site is about, individual katas that you can explore by their appropriate subset.

JavaScript Fundamentals for ES6

ECMAScript 6, or ES6, is the next version of JavaScript, and includes many enhancements and new features that make JavaScript coding easier and more maintainable. This course will teach you all of the features of this newest version, with an emphasis on the tools and technologies that will let you leverage these features today, even before they are fully implemented by browsers and Node. The content goes on for nearly 5 hours, so there is plenty of learning to be done.

Learn Harmony

A very cool and lightweight platform for learning the basics of ES6 features. It works just like Codecademy would, with each lessons being explained thoroughly, and some are complimented by community comments. It doesn’t get any easier than this.

ES6 Fiddle

Does your favorite JavaScript code editor supports ES6 already? If not, let them know that the standard is out! Though, I’m sure they already know that. The ES6 Fiddle is a simple code fiddling tool for ES6 code, and comes equipped with several code examples already: top right corner, dropdown.

Exploring ES6

This is the book I was talking about at the beginning of the post, the one by Dr. Axel Rauschmayer. It’s been picking up some good heat from top publications already, and has been dubbed as a truly remarkable resource on learning all that which JavaScript is and can be. It’s incredibly comprehensive and concise and this book will certainly stay on your shelves for a long time, and luckily for us — Axel has been kind enough to provide a free-to-read version online!

Understanding ECMAScript 6

A good book will go a long way of learning something, and this book is no exception, however there is one thing to know — this book was not written for people who have never written JavaScript before (which I guess is a good thing for a lot of you), and here is the full quote:

This book is intended as a guide for those who are already familiar with JavaScript and ECMAScript 5. While a deep understanding of the language isn’t necessary to use this book, it is helpful in understanding the differences between ECMAScript 5 and 6. In particular, this book is aimed at intermediate-to-advanced JavaScript developers (both browser and Node.js environments) who want to learn about the future of the language.

on top of that, it actually is free to read online, so I recommend that you donate and help to promote the work of Nicholas C. Zakas if you enjoyed what he shared.

You Don’t Know JS: ES6 & Beyond

This is an early release book that’s still being edited, but all the chapters have been written, and the book is expected to come out fully in July. Anyway, the focus is on JavaScript and what it is, and what it means for different kinds of developers. The main focus, of course, is to unravel the features of ES6 and what they mean for future development. There’s a decent amount of stuff that goes into the deeper aspects of JS, parts that many avoid for the sake of lack of information out there. A great book to draw you closer to JS mastery.

JavaScript Allongé, the “Six” Edition

Once again, we have an amazing author sharing his work for free (to read) online, the JavaScript Allongé book is about programming with functions, and focuses purely on JavaScript as a language; because of it’s popularity and flexibility. The book reads like butter on toast, and anything that seems unfamiliar at first, is later on explained in understandable language.

ECMAScript 2015

Medium has built their own little featured section for ECMAScript 2015, all the articles are written by Maciej Rzepiński and focus on the general features of the new standard, as well as some insightful stuff of what to expect in the coming months.

Things You Need To Know About ECMAScript 6

Interesting little piece that covers 12 things you should know about ES6. With focus on how the new features are going to work, nothing more than a refresher, still counts — right?

A Smooth Transition to ECMAScript 6

Here we have a post from Ben Lewis who talks about the transition phase of ES6 and how to best approach it. Surely now that it is an official standard, we will start to see plentiful of content related to ES6 in general, so articles like this are nice!

Resources for Learning ECMAScript 6

That’s about it for our first draft of this resourceful post. We will have to see how the future of this standard unfolds, and what kind of content is coming out the most, since I do believe that this post could be more neatly organized if only we had a little bit more people writing about their experiences of ES6 in general, rather than waiting on things to happen. Let us know what more you can suggest for this roundup and we will look into it.