Everything I learned about Javascript, I learned on the web
Yesterday, during an interview I said regarding the fact that, according to Ohloh our applications is written mostly in Javascript
: "Javascript is an impressive elegant, but often misunderstood language.". The applicant answed that this was the first time he heard someone saying that, but recent signs show I am not alone with my opinion:
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: "Javascript is an impressive elegant, but often misunderstood language.". The applicant answed that this was the first time he heard someone saying that, but recent signs show I am not alone with my opinion:
- Jeff Atwood calls Javascript the lingua franca of the Web
- Frameworks like Apache Cocoon, Butterfly or TrimPath Junction (a Rails clone written in Javascript) bring Javascript to the Server side
- Toolkits like Dojo or jQuery show what is possible with Javascript on the client side.
The interesting thing is: I have been developing in Javascript for nearly all of my programmer's life, but have never possessed a single Javascript book. This is part due to a misunderstanding of the language ("It's just a toy language for scripting web pages" - which it is not) and part due to the great resources on the web for developing Javascript.
- I started with SelfHTML
- later used Peter Paul Koch's Quirksmode
- and the Mozilla Javascript Reference and Rhino Reference
- and most recently Douglas Crockford's website and his excellent video lessons.
With more and more applications built unpon Javascript, server-side, client side in web sites, in rich internet applications based on Firefox, Thunderbird or XULRunner or Actionscript, developers will have to learn about the beauty of Javascript, but also about the dark sides.
This article is a part of Lars Trieloff's weblog. If you like this article please subscribe to my feed and get automatically notified of updates.
I am Product Manager for Collaboration and Digital Asset Management at
it is a no frills coverage that is robust enough to cover 90% of syntax questions i have ever had.
Posted by Wade Harrell on May 22, 2007 at 07:42 PM CEST #