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0 pointskartikkumar11y ago0 comments

Thanks, I guess that's along my line of thought at the moment.

My interpretation from my limited exposure is that RoR is a big step up from "vanilla Ruby" and that the community in that case is consolidated enough that it's pretty much a no-brainer to just start with RoR as a beginner. In the case of JS it seems like a movement towards consolidation in that sense is still a long way off, meaning that "vanilla JS" knowledge carries more value than it might do 5 years from now. I've also wondered if all the energy that's being pumped into frameworks and libraries wouldn't yield more if it was targeted towards completely replacing JS with something that's more akin to modern (front-end) dev from the ground up. Maybe that's a silly thought, given legacy and the close relationship with browser development, but as an outsider it seems like a lot of energy is spent on "warring" that could perhaps be focussed more productively in a different direction altogether.

Any other JS resources you would recommend to start from the bottom outwards/upwards?

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3 comments · 2 top-level

dccoolgai11y ago· 1 in thread

Resources:

1. https://developer.chrome.com/devtools/docs/console-api

2. https://developer.chrome.com/devtools/docs/commandline-api

If you are doing webdev, Chrome DevTools is everything. The console and CLI are your window to the truth. It literally spells the difference between wondering why things work like an idiot and knowing it like a boss. Pay special attention to getEventListeners(IClickThisAndItBreaks), debug(WeirdFunction), console.trace().

3. http://caniuse.com/

The things in that list: You should know a lot of them. You should know OF almost all of them (what they do on a conceptual level).

4. Hate to reco a paid thing, but this book was critical to me: Secrets of the Javascript Ninja by Resig. TL;DR: Everything in JS is a function. There is 1 thing to know about functions: The "Everything/Nothing Rule" (my paraphrase) - Scope has everything to do with how the function is declared and nothing to do with how it's called. "this" has everything to do with how a function is called and nothing to do with how it's declared.

5. Embrace Function-ness: lodash.com/docs

6. Embrace Event-ness: http://api.jquery.com/callbacks.add/

7. Embrace Async-ness. Easiest way for me on this was to dabble with Node - async.js & promises.

8. After you lock all that down (don't get scared - it's actually easier than it sounds), learn how a browser really works and performs. Good place to start on that: http://superherojs.com/ - "Under the Hood" section. (Other good links there, too.)

9. Follow people like Jake Archibald to learn about the Web's "coming soon" stuff like https://jakearchibald.github.io/isserviceworkerready/

kartikkumarOP11y ago

Wow, awesome list! Thanks for putting the time and effort into putting that together. Sounds like I have a plan laid out to get started over the winter break! Thanks!

jdhawk11y ago

Wouldn't it be nice if everyone concentrated on compiling JS into an IL/VM type environment (Java, .NET) - so we could extend the <script> tag into other languages?

JavaScript has gotten so much traction due to the development of Node, which allows a common code base. Wouldn't it be nice if we could have Ruby/Python/Go/ASP.NET/PHP/<...> running on the browser & the server?

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