HN Explorer

Ask HN: JavaScript is cool again, but the learning resources suck...

17 points by scooby2 ↗ HN
...so if you had to recommend one JavaScript learning resource, what would it be?

Specifically I'm looking for something suitable for a relative novice (have done some cut & paste programming and messed with RoR), and that focuses on core JavaScript without getting bogged down in DOM stuff (I'll get to that later!).

Web searches turn up a bunch of mostly outdated resources or focused on browser development. I did find the moz stuff, but I'm looking for something more tutorial or easier to digest.

What's your top: website, book, webcast?...

Thanks!

6 comments

[ 7.3 ms ] story [ 66.6 ms ] thread
craigsmitham
http://eloquentjavascript.net/ - HTML version has interactive console to practice exercises

http://javascript.infogami.com/Javascript_in_Ten_Minutes

http://yuiblog.com/crockford/

http://javascript.crockford.com/

More advanced:

http://www.addyosmani.com/resources/essentialjsdesignpattern...

http://bonsaiden.github.com/JavaScript-Garden/

scooby2
Thank you! Those first two look very promising. I'd found the Crockford Files (!) before, and whilst they look interesting for historical reasons, much of it was lost on me at this stage.
bergie
I blogged a bunch of resources recently: http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/the_universal_runtime/

And yes, Eloquent JavaScript rocks

scooby2
Thanks. CoffeeScript looks interesting - quite Rubyish, although I'd be a bit worried that by going that route I'm going to end up having to learn both syntaxes (syntaxi ?-) to understand / debug the resulting JavaScript, or to make use of other JS code snippets.

Interesting blog article BTW, and part of the reason I picked JS to have a bash at.

devinrhode2
w3schools.com. Your one stop shop. It has never failed me, but more importantly, I've succeeded faster than ever with it.

Want to create text shadows? just search on w3, copy code, modify.

But it doesn't stop there! w3 is faster, more concise, and more functional for jQuery than jQuery.com itself!

With w3, you can start doing things without knowing how. (You learn when you start modifying the code.)