Pluralsight Course - Yeoman Fundamentals

So as one of my New Year Resolutions I set myself the target of taking 12 online courses this year.

The first course I took is quite a short one. It's a good introduction to Yeoman. I found it through an email shot from Plurasight about new courses recently. It wasn't a technology that I was familiar with so it piqued my interest.

What is it?

Yeoman( http://yeoman.io/) is an application that allows you to build project scaffolding templates so you can take the sting out of spinning up new projects. It's installable as a npm package and getting started is quick

Where would I use it?

It is deliberately technology agnostic. Even though it is a Node based application this isn't only for starting new node applications. You can find generators for most technologies. That’s a really nice touch because if you're starting with a new technology it might be useful to leverage some tribal knowledge from the community to get started up in a common configuration.

If you find yourself spending a lot of time just ramping up a project this might be a good tool for you.

This course sets out to guide you on the path to creating your own customer generator. There are a lot of community built generators out there so if you think you would rather just be a client maybe you don't need the course as there's probably enough in the documentation

What's the barrier to entry?

JS knowledge and Node experience isn't NEEDED to follow it but definitely would help. I think though the more you know the easier it's going to be to follow. I did end up deciding to not follow along but instead just watch the screen cast.

Is the course easy to follow?

I found the course very easy to get started on.

Steve Michelotti (https://twitter.com/smichelotti) was a good guide on this. He's very clear with everything he explains. He brings you through static files to using EJS templates. I think by the end of this you feel confident enough at least embarking on creating a generator for real.

I mentioned before that if you aren't planning on building a custom generator then maybe the course is slight overkill. Whilst that's true I personally found it useful to see some of the inner workings and get a little bit deeper with how it works.

The one negative I would say, and it's my own fault, is I'm actually not that au fait with the whole Node ecosystem and I found myself pausing to go WHATS THAT or WHAT a lot. It got the the point I stopped trying to follow along with my own version and just watched what was happening as I felt I really needed to focus. For others with experience of those tools etc I think it will be

Yeoman also offer their own codelab tutorial on building an application with a generator so more using yeoman than building with it. It's expected to take an hour so would be a little shorter and may be a good free alternative

How I may use it in the future :

So initially I thought this is maybe not going to have a practical use for me because I'm not in a front end shop doing lots of new custom websites/projects. Then it dawned on me (and not surprisingly it had already occurred to everyone who ever used Yeoman before) that this fits perfectly in a Microservices environment too.

If you have a preferred structure of projects then creating a yeoman Generator just makes sense. The cost investment isn't huge as there' s a lot of very good starting points already. It's great to get everyone starting off on the right foot.

Would I recommend it?

If you have access to pluralsight then definitely. It's a small course at a good pace so well worth a visit. Failing that the free codelab tutorial looks good for learning how to use yeoman and the wealth of generators currently out there.