JavaScript is awesome. You can do so much with it, from adding interactivity and animations to a website, to writing programs and scripts with Node. It's pretty easy to learn (in the scheme of programming languages) and very powerful.
People love to hate on JS. It can be used to track people around the web. It has some technical idiosyncracies (that's gotten a lot better in the last 20 years though). It can make websites slower in some circumstances. For the most part, these are problems caused by bad development practices, which you do not necessarily have to follow.
By no means do you need JS to make great websites, but it absolutely can take them to the next level. Add this powerful tool to your toolbox and learn JavaScript!
Unus Nemo
in reply to Senna 🌷 • •@Senna 🌷 When JavaScript started out it was a little more than a few event handlers to add some bells and whistles to your site, and perhaps avoid some round trips to the server by validating forms. It has grown up into a full fledged programming language. I have always enjoyed JavaScript. The few things I wish we had held onto is. No Cross Domain Scripting. This may seem like a huge limitation though it really is not. Cross Domain Scripting is at the heart of what most people hate about the web. Personally, I will not even use a CDN. I simply have no reason to.
Node does make it great, that you can use the same language frontend and backend. Helps in the learning curve for lots of developers. There is a reason why JavaScript is the most popular language in world today. Unfortunately it seems some developers have taken to just gluing together some frameworks and libraries and not bother to learn how to program at all. They have no idea what they are missing.
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Felix 🐊
in reply to Senna 🌷 • • •I want to learn! Do you have any good resources to learn from where I can set up a good foundation for a variety of projects?
I have experience in intermediate C# programming, and have dipped my toes into JS on at least 10 separate occasions. It seems like every javascript library has some sort of idomatic way of doing things and enough syntactic sugar to make it almost a derivative of the lanugage. Typescript is its own can of worms but many of the open source projects I'd like to contribue to use it. I've been told "vanilla javascript" can make it all seem more approachable but practically every project that I want to work on seems to use a library of some kind.
It all seems very mystifying 😩
Senna 🌷
in reply to Felix 🐊 • • •@crocodisle so I would definitely recommend learning plain JS first, because none of the libraries or frameworks will make sense unless you understand what they are based on 😺 That said, every library has its own special rules, so you'll probably just have to pick one that you are interested in and focus on learning it for a while.
As far as resources for learning JS, it depends on your learning style! Personally I am a hands-on learner, so I like to follow along with tutorials on YouTube, while having a reference text open on the side to look up things I don't understand yet.
YouTube channels I recommend:
- FreeCodeCamp.org ⭐
- Web Dev Simplified
- Programming with Mosh
- Fireship
Sites that have good text-based tutorials:
- FreeCodeCamp.org
- Digital Ocean
- dev.to
Reference texts:
- W3Schools.com ⭐
- developer.Mozilla.org
If you are more of a systematic learner, I definitely recommend the textb
... show more@crocodisle so I would definitely recommend learning plain JS first, because none of the libraries or frameworks will make sense unless you understand what they are based on 😺 That said, every library has its own special rules, so you'll probably just have to pick one that you are interested in and focus on learning it for a while.
As far as resources for learning JS, it depends on your learning style! Personally I am a hands-on learner, so I like to follow along with tutorials on YouTube, while having a reference text open on the side to look up things I don't understand yet.
YouTube channels I recommend:
- FreeCodeCamp.org ⭐
- Web Dev Simplified
- Programming with Mosh
- Fireship
Sites that have good text-based tutorials:
- FreeCodeCamp.org
- Digital Ocean
- dev.to
Reference texts:
- W3Schools.com ⭐
- developer.Mozilla.org
If you are more of a systematic learner, I definitely recommend the textbook "JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, 7th Edition" ⭐.
I hope this is helpful! Disclaimer, I am more of a beginner-intermediate level JS programmer, with a focus on making web apps and interactive websites. So my recommendations are probably biased in that direction.
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Unus Nemo
in reply to Felix 🐊 • •@Felix 🐊 @Senna 🌷 Definitely everything that @Senna 🌷 mentioned and I would also recommend JavaScript The Good Part by Douglas Crockford. It is an older book though still relevant and not at all that expensive.
JavaScript The Good Parts @ Thrift Books
JavaScript The Good Parts @ Amazon
JavaScript The Definitive Guide 7th Edition @ Amazon
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