I fully agree with this assessment.
On Jan 27, 2010, at 8:44 AM, Ryan Joy <[email protected]> wrote:
I'm going to go against the grain here and recommend that you learn/
teach JavaScript rather than a specific library. jQuery may not be
the darling of the web development industry next year and even if it
is, you're not always able to use the library of your choice.
Learn these things:
* JavaScript Core / Programming concepts - Here you need to know
about variables, functions, loop & conditional statements (for,
while, with, if, switch), arrays, objects. It's important to grasp
syntax.
Book - A reference manual, The Definitive Guide, or websites such as
http://www.croczilla.com/~alex/reference/javascript_guide/index.html
* JavaScript DOM - Learn how to manipulate the DOM using JavaScript.
Know how to get an element from a page and do something to it
(attach an onclick event, change it's style, make it disappear)
without the use of a library.
Book - DOM Scripting by Jeremy Keith
* AJAX - Learn to create a XHR request in a compliant browser and do
something interesting with the data. Insert into the DOM, update a
input field value, etc.
Book - Bulletproof AJAX or the books you already have
Once you've worked through bare bones examples of everything I've
mentioned above, look at jQuery, Prototype, MooTools, or YUI to see
how easy they make it! Their purpose is to smooth out browser
differences and enable rapid development. They don't replace the
JavaScript language.
-RYAN JOY
http://ryanjoy.com
http://twitter.com/atxryan
On Jan 27, 2010, at 9:26 AM, Trevor Rosen wrote:
Second on the jQuery recommendation -- helps get people's feet wet
and show them how to do some pretty impressive stuff pretty
quickly. In my experience, early results are the best way to
foster ongoing interest when trying to teach dev skills, as there's
almost always a bit of a learning curve and it's easy to get
frustrated in the beginning.
A course of study for web designers built around jQuery would
probably involve DOM manipulation, style changes, and stuff in the
jQuery UI library(fades, tabs, hide/reveal logic, etc). Why not
start with those? The jQuery docs are pretty great and would get
you a long way on these fronts.
Bookwise, these have been the resources that helped me the most
with JS:
-- "Javascript: The Definitive Guide" - definitely the JS bible and
main reference. Not so great on the teaching front, but will have
the, well, definitive answer to anything you need to know about the
language itself.
-- "The Book of Javascript" - a bit outdated, but has a very good
style of line-by-line teaching that I found very useful when doing
my early learning.
-- "jQuery in Action" - this is THE book on jQuery and happens to
have a couple *excellent* appendices for simply learning what JS is
all about from a 50k-foot view. Gets pretty heavy into the
internals of jQuery and some of the fundamental concepts of
computer science that Javascript is using (closures, object
orientation, scoping, etc).
Anything from Headfirst is usually pretty good though. Dunno much
about the other books on your list.
hope that helps,
-TR
On Jan 27, 2010, at 9:58 AM, Adrian Nye wrote:
I'd advise you learn/teach Jquery which is a form of javascript.
You can get a lot more done in less time
with Jquery than raw Javascript, it's more forgiving, and it hides
some quirks across browsers. Get firebug and use
firefox and start playing with it. Since you don't have much
programming experience you're probably going to
look online for something close to what you need to do and then
modify it.
As far as teaching it to non-developers, it is a programming
language, and not an easy one, so you either need to take on
teaching
that whole skill/subject, or you need to stick to common recipes.
__________________________________
Do, or do not. There is no "Try".
-Yoda
----- Original Message ----
From: Gina <[email protected]>
To: Refresh Austin <[email protected]>
Sent: Tue, January 26, 2010 9:36:01 PM
Subject: [Refresh Austin: 4921] JavaScript
Hi all,
Looking for suggestions on how to learn JavaScript. I need to
learn it
from the ground up and be able to teach others, but I am really
overwhelmed.
The books I am using seem to be confusing me even more. I am used
to
just using Spry to do the work for me, but now that I want to
gain a
better grasp of it, I am stumped.
Here are the books I am trying to use:
Head First JavaScript
JavaScript for Web Developers
JavaScript & Ajax Visual Quickstart Guide
Scriptin' with JavaScript and Ajax
All have information, but none are really helping me design a
course
around it.
Any suggestions or ideas on learning/teaching JavaScript to web
designers (not developers)?
-GinaGwen
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