Learning Paths for JavaScript

Cody Lindley on finding your way through a popular and powerful language

Everyone learns and teaches JavaScript their own way, but Cody Lindley (@codylindley) has spent a lot of time with a lot of different kinds of learners. He made the jQuery Cookbook happen, finding and managing contributors as well as making a large contribution himself, and he’s a regular at JavaScript conferences.

O’Reilly recently published his JavaScript Enlightenment and DOM Enlightenment, so it seemed like a good time to talk about how developers find their way through the many choices JavaScript offers.

Highlights include:

  • JavaScript developer? Or front-end engineer? Websites? Or applications? (at 0:52)
  • Don’t be down on jQuery users (at 2:03)
  • JavaScript objects are different, and critical (at 4:07)
  • The varying degrees of genius in JavaScript libraries (at 7:17)
  • Are buffers between your code and browser APIs necessary? (at 9:17)
  • Running browser tests on the DOM (at 11:08)
  • Needing more focused in-depth documentation (at 12:57)

His closing – “we need to do a better job communicating with the bulk of developers out there” – sounded just right to me.

You can view the entire conversation in the following video:

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