Sorry for the semi-rant here. I am hooked on javascript and want some direction on where to explore next!
I know the default answer is to just look around at sites and fire up firebug, but that may be inefficient as it’s likely many sites have bad design and I won’t be able to tell. I could use blogs and sites to follow, like http://ajaxian.com/, John Resig’s blog, the YUI site, etc. Any comments are greatly appreciated! 🙂
Summary: Job needed to write a web app as a support tool. I begrudgingly took the task up to learn a bit of web stuff to implement a snazzy UI. (I come from a computer hardware background with all low level imperative stuff) I saw a jQuery UI demo and also came across an “ajax for dummies” guide pointing to jQuery, so I told myself I’d learn the minimum needed to do my damn job, but that would be it.
I bought the Jonathan Chaffer book Learning jQuery 1.3 and read the minimum needed to make my app work, but I was bothered that I didn’t really understand the anonymous functions used, first class objects, etc. I did get an eyebrow raise from the interesting appendix on closures, and began thinking “hmm, that’s cool…” So I bought the giant O’Reilly Definitive Guide and read through it. Wanted to know more, so I got the Douglas Crockford book (JS: The Good Parts) and went through his website – wow now I just blew away my previous understanding of JS prototypal inheritance (I was doing it the new() way) and damn, design patterns and unit testing frameworks in this language too? Javascript really must be more serious than I thought! With this newfound background I’m going through the jQuery library and dissecting its guts.
I don’t know where to go from here though. Ideas I have but am not sure how to go about exploring include:
- Get more into JS’ integration into web architecture. I’ve only been doing basic XHRs, to serialize a few variables and do a GET to retrieve DB stored information, did XML->JSON conversion and back. But there’s probably much, much more to make a app like gmail. Where to start?
- Graphics and animations seem interesting. Saw some really cool demos from Google I/O 2009. I don’t have a graphics background though so I’d need tips on where to start with the theory. I also don’t know where JS’ graphics capabilities overlap with Flash
Thanks guys! This community is the best (be kind to me, I’m an electrical engineer for my job, not a software guy)
The comp.lang.javascript newsgroup is a good place to advance your JavaScript. There are some seriously knowledgeable and opinionated people who regularly post there. You may need to brace yourself for the somewhat abrasive tone of some of the regulars though.