About a year and a half ago I started focusing on javascript again. I’m not really a developer here at CNET (though you’d be hard pressed to tell) but javascript was a means to an end and I didn’t really have anyone here that could do the work, so I rolled up my sleeves, unaware that I’d be spending this much time on the subject. It’s a good thing I find this stuff fun.

Anyway, over the course of that time I learned a lot of the ins and outs of writing javascript well. I blogged about many of these discoveries along the way here on this blog. But if you’re just getting started with javascript, or you suspect that you’re writing things without really understanding them, or maybe you’re using javascript the “old way” or whatever, where do you start?

All my tutorial work just assumes that you know a lot of these ins and outs and doesn’t spend much time talking about the whys of “new” javascript methodology.
Over my lunch break I thumbed my way through Jonathan Snook’s Accelerated DOM Scripting with Ajax, APIs, and Libraries and if you feel like you need a primer on how to do “modern” javascript, it’s a great starter book. It covers a lot of stuff from the DOM to Ajax, closures and more.

It touches on Libraries (prototype, YUI, jQuery, Mootools, etc.) but it’s not going to teach you to use them. Instead it shows you a lot of the conceptual stuff going on in frameworks and helps you understand modern browsers and the javascript concepts that they implement.

If you’re just getting started with javascript, I highly recommend it. Even if you’re already using a framework, you can pick up some good practices from the examples and illustrations and detailed under-the-hood information.

Despite it being a rather technical book, it’s written so that even if you’re new to javascript you can learn a lot from it. It will help if you have experience with programming in general, as it assumes you have a general understanding of object oriented practices, but beyond that the book is very approachable.

-A.N.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 9th, 2007 at 1:40 pm and is filed under Best Practices, Code Snippets, Reference. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.