(no subject)

[erda]

I'm curious to know how much javascript knowledge you all have. I'm about 170 pages into my Javascript Beginner's guide, so I know, um, not much.

Comments

[rivenwanderer]

I know "enough to spend most of my time working with it for my day job"--the huge swaths of javascript that my coworker set up to run our site uses a lot of functions-that-return-other-functions and JSON and other things that seem kind of advanced but cool and useful. I know there are gaps in my knowledge, but I can find my way around well enough to read the code that's there, modify it, add my own, and look up the things that I'm not sure about.

[erda]

Sounds like you know quite a lot to me. I'd be ecstatic to be able to say I could do that much.

[rivenwanderer]

*nod* I'm not trying to do the false modesty thing here... it's more that my learning process has been somewhat quirky and disorganized (and walking the fine line between cargo-culting and learning-by-doing)... so I have less of a structured, well-rounded understanding of javascript than I'd like. I hope that I can put my working knowledge to use here and help out others with questions, and also push myself to do more background reading and gain a better understanding of the language in the process.

[arya]

I have no knowledge, unfortunately, as I actually joined the comm to ask for some tricks/guides/links to the best js tutorial they've encountered during their learnings. I was just... uh, too shy to start a post asking for those links and tutorials, hehe.

May I ask what beginner guide you're reading? Has it been helpful and easy to understand? I'm starting to browse through the net for some beginner guide but as there were lots (and I prefer books), I was hoping I could ask the internet for their ideas too.

Good luck on that guide, by the way!

[erda]

The book I have is called JavaScript A beginner's Guide by John Pollock. I like it pretty much, mostly because it has these extremely easy quizes and tests that are fun to take.

You didn't mention if you have experience in programming outside of Javascript. The one thing I didn't like in my book is that it assumed total zero knowledge of any kind of programming, so a lot of it went into excruciating detail about very elementary stuff I already knew.

I also have this book, which doesn't belabor elementary concepts as much, though it also assumes you have no programming experience at all. This may actually be the better book, but it doesn't have the fun tests.