A brief review of Vue learning resources — State of 2018
When it comes to mastering any skill, you’re not going to learn everything you need to know from one book. This is why blossoming frameworks like Vue.js need a lot of educational producers. It’s good for everyone, and everyone will need lots of educational resources on their way to mastery.
Gregg Pollack
This quote has so much truth in it. No matter how many books I read, podcasts I listen to or videos I watch, there is always something new to pick up.
In this post, we will go through both premium and free learning resources, so there will be something for everyone. Some of these may be a bit steep for someone just starting out, but split with a friend, ask your boss to pay for it, look out for sales, in the end it will surely pay off.
The times when the Vue docs were the only learning resource are long gone. There is so much quality material out there that you cannot read it all.
I will go through the ones that helped me become a full-time Vue developer and a lead developer at Hypefactors.
Premium material
Vue JS 2 — The Complete Guide (incl. Vue Router & Vuex)
Author: Maximilian Schwarzmüller
Link: https://www.udemy.com/vuejs-2-the-complete-guide/
This is probably the cheapest course you can buy. Udemy make sales all the time, so for around 10 bucks, you can grab the whole course. It was the first video course I bought, specially for Vue.
Maximilian does a great job at explaining things and he also has follow up videos on YouTube that are worth checking out. Plus he covers other topics as well.
The course covers all the important topics, from the Vue basics, props, form handling, Vuex, Vue Router and others. He is also updating the course, from what I saw, he has added Vue CLI 3 in there.
Majesty of Vue 2
Authors: Alex Kyriakidis , Kostas Maniatis
Link: https://leanpub.com/vuejs2
The first edition was probably the first book ever released about Vue development in general. The second edition did not disappoint as well. It covers, again, all the important topics a novice Vue developer should read on: props, events, two way binding, component communication and much more. Each section is packed with lots of examples and tips.
The first part of the book does not use the CLI, ES6 or anything like that, so novice devs can get straight into development in the browser. At a later point it continues with Webpack, SFC’s, what transpilation is and so on. There is no Vuex or Vue Router material, from what I remember, it’s more dedicated to Vue it self.
Laracasts
Author: Jeffrey Way
Link: http://laracasts.com/
Now I know, this is not a Vue specific resource, its Laravel oriented… but hear me out. Jeffrey Way was one of the first people who started pushing video content about Vue, back when it was v0.12!!! His efforts along with Taylor’s affinity for Vue pushed it to be the de facto front-end framework for Laravel. And Laravel is currently dominating the PHP realm.
Now don’t get me wrong, Jeffrey is no Vue guru, he does however do a magnificent job at showing a variety of different use cases, like reusing components, charts, mixins, object oriented form handling and many more. I am talking about actual components and patterns, things you can actually use, not the lame todo app we have all done a million times already.
A subscription will get you access to allot of Laravel related tutorials as well! Laravel is a perfect framework for building API’s for Vue, I should know, I’ve used it many times and our Hypefactors API is written on Laravel 5.6 at the time of writing. This makes Laracasts an even more appetizing bite because you will learn how to build your API as well as your App.
Not only that, but Jeffrey is such a good teacher, that I bet once you go through a few videos, you will want more. The “jump into the dom” and “lets cache this” phrases keep ringing in the back of my head, some of you know what I mean.
Vue Mastery
Authors: Gregg Pollack , Adam Jahr
Link: https://www.vuemastery.com/
This is the most recent one I’ve gone through and to be honest I was mostly focused at the Advanced Components series and I have to say, I liked them. Listening about Vue’s reactivity, proxies, Virtual DOM and how it works was actually really interesting to me, plus having Evan there to explain things made it even cooler. What better than the man himself, right?
Both Gregg and Adam are veterans in video tutorials and do an amazing job at visually explaining things with code, animations, icons, arrows and so on.
They do have introduction videos, which are free, ranging from Vue basics like events, prop binding, communication, forms to real world examples, like Single File components, Vue Router, Axios, with Vuex just around the corner.
Keep in mind they are constantly pushing new content so new material is probably available by the time you are reading this.
Not to mention they host the official Vue Newsletter podcast and share screen recordings of the Vue Conf US. More on that bellow.
Alright, so we dipped our toes into more advanced stuff, so let’s continue in the same manner.
Advanced Vue Component Design
Author: Adam Wathan
Link: https://adamwathan.me/advanced-vue-component-design/
Adam Wathan is a popular figure in the Laravel community. He has an exceptional book about testing Laravel and his recent project Tailwind CSS spread like wildfire, it’s pretty rad, go try it out.
The course is a tad bit on the pricey side, but it goes on sale from time to time. If you are serious about using Vue for big apps its a no brainer.
He covers so many of the pain points we all have had when using Vue in the real world. Ranging from implementing external libraries, modals, slots, scoped slots, render functions and many many more.
This is not a course for new developers. It uses ES6+ features, SFC, slots and all the good stuff.
I personally had a blast going through it, even though I have been a Vue dev for a long time, I picked up a few useful techniques.
Testing Vue Applications
Author: Edd Yerburgh
Link: https://www.manning.com/books/testing-vuejs-applications
You do test your apps, right? Right? Hehe :)
Any serious developer knows they should unit and e2e test their code. The author Edd Yerburgh is the guy behind @vue/test-utils, a utility library for testing Vue applications and he wrote this book about testing Vue apps. The book recently went out of MEAP and is an exceptional learning resource.
He covers all the necessary topics for testing Vue apps — testing components, mixins, Vuex, Vue Router, mocking dependencies, mocking the store, it’s all there. On top of that there is a plethora of examples in the Hackernoon clone he made on GitHub. The book does make the assumption the reader is a novice Vue developer so spends a good part of each section explaining what will be done and how. I found that a bit boring, so I just skipped to the meat of it, tests.
He uses Jest for unit tests which for me is a no brainer. Jest is awesome! Heard of snapshot testing? You will :) E2E tests are done with Nightwatch, which I personally don’t like as much as Cypress, but that’s a minor detail. You can adapt to whatever framework you like.
I bought the book when it was just released as a MEAP, and I think I have gone through it fully two times.
Resources I have not had the chance to try but look pretty solid
Fullstack Vue
Authors: Hassan Djirdeh, Nate Murray, Ari Lerner
Link: https://www.fullstack.io/vue/
Man that cover… I want to have it on my bookshelf.
This book looks like a pretty cool introduction into using Vue with a backend, though it states nowhere what backend they use. Looking at the table of contents you will learn about SFC’s, Events, Vuex, Routing, even a bit of tests in there. Price is decent and they have experience with other trendy frameworks like React, React Native and Angular.
Vue School
Author: Alex Kyriakidis
Link: https://vueschool.io/
Vue School is developed by one of the core Vue developers and the co author of Majesty of Vue — Alex Kyriakidis, lessons are curated by Rolf Haug and the Vue docs man himself, Chris Fritz. The website offers free courses like integrating Vue with Firebase db and Firebase authentication, Vuex and more.
The premium course shows how to build a forum and covers a variety of topics like Plugins, Webpack configs, SEO, Linting, Form Handling, Firebase DB, authorization and much much more. What I noticed is, the course covers a wide range topics, from the general ones we’ve all seen, to real world pain points one might end up with.
Definitely worth checking out.
Learn Advanced Vue.js Features from the ground up
Author: Evan You
Link: https://frontendmasters.com/courses/advanced-vue/
OK so this is not a course for everyone. This course is probably for those who are already well into Vue and really want to know how the engine works under the hood. Just looking at the topics: Reactivity, Writing Plugins, Render Functions, you know its getting real.
The course is authored by the Vue.js creator Evan You him self, if that isn't awesome, i don't know what is.
I confess I have not had the opportunity to buy and go through it, but its on the list.
Enterprise Vue
Author: Anthony Gore
Link: https://vuejsdevelopers.com/courses/enterprise-vue
Not yet released, but by the looks of it, will be also jam packed with good stuff. The author, Anthony Gore is the man behind Vuejsdevelopers.com, one of the first blogs about Vue development. Keep an eye out for it.
Free material
Vuejsdevelopers
Authors: Anthony Gore and contributors
Link: http://vuejsdevelopers.com/
We just mentioned Anthony’s future course, so let’s look into his blog. Vuejs Developers is a one stop shop for all things Vue. Articles are original, revolve around a variety of topics and touch new and emerging tech, plus they are curated by Anthony himself.
Alligator.io
Link: https://alligator.io/vuejs/
I swear this is both the weirdest and coolest name ever. They have a lot of material in all kinds of Vue related topics, and not only. I do mean all kinds, Vuepress, TypeScript, various plugins, Vue CLI.
Vue-enterprise-boilerplate
Author: Chris Fritz
The man behind the Vue docs, Chris Fritz, made this ever updating and evolving repo, jam packed with best practices for when your App gets into enterprise territory. I kid you not, I look at it every week… at least.
It has tips on using code generators for common boilerplate, Vuex module tricks, first class tests, its pure gold.
Views on Vue
Author: Chris Fritz and guests
Link: https://devchat.tv/views-on-vue/
Speaking about Chris, he co-hosts this awesome Vue podcast. Cool guests, good vibe, dev jokes everywhere, good stuff. I listen to it when driving, alone, away from interruption. You can find also other cool podcasts on devchat, related to not only Vue.
Official Vue Newsletter
Authors: Damian Dulisz, Krzysztof Jung, Gregg Pollack, Adam Jahr
Link: https://news.vuejs.org/
One of the best ways to learn about the new things in the Vue.js world is by subscribing to the weekly Vue newsletter. Every week the authors go through the most important news, new released tutorials, hot tweets, plugins and more, serving it all in a curated, easy to glance through manner.
Did I mention they also have an audio podcast of each issue? How cool is that! Want to hear your name get mentioned there? Go, contribute to the Vue ecosystem, write a plugin, make a guide, I know I loved it.
Official Vue Docs
Link: https://vuejs.org/v2/guide/
Vue is well known for having one of the best docs out there, and you better believe it. Allot of examples, good separation of functionality, easy introduction for novices.
The docs are constantly being improved and worked upon so give them a check from time to time. New gems appear all the time.
There is also the Official Vue Cookbook. It is a superb collection of tips and tricks from various contributors, revised and curated by Sarah Drasner.
The Official Style Guide is also a good resource on how to structure your components.
Conference workshops
Did you know that Vue experts and core team members from around the world do workshops at conferences? No? Well now you do.
You can buy a ticket to a Vue conference + a whole day at one of those workshops and be thought by the leading people in the Vue branch. Dont miss out on the opportunity to ask those people questions, live and in person. You get the added bonus of hanging out at the after party with some of the coolest devs on earth.
In conclusion
I shared a lot of resources, most of which I personally have gone through and can vouch for.
Premium courses of course handle more detailed and advanced topics, in a more linear and curated manner, whereas blogs typically share a variety of topics by many authors.
Which one to pick? What do you prefer? Video or books? What is your budget? Go through their table of contents and decide.
There is no better one, you cannot read one book and say I know it. You have to go through a handful of videos and articles, then apply what you’ve learned in the real world.
