Many months ago I wrote about my frustration in trying to learn JavaScript. It has been my difficulty and my secret for far too long. So for the holidays I took vacation time and the week between Christmas and New Years I studied JavaScript. I am loaded up with books and I am also using a few online resources. I have an idea for a project where I’m going to code a gauge that will pull information from a data warehouse that my husband built that to learn how to do that sort of thing (yes we are a geeky household). So with all that, I dug in to start learning. It is going very slowly, I mean really slowly. My poor mind just doesn’t work great with this stuff, but I am persevering and I have to say that I am learning. By the end of the week I was getting the problems and I was understanding what I was doing.
So in the next couple weeks I will be soldiering on and trying to get my project built out over the weekends. But I have to say, this is the farthest I’ve come and I have also figured out how I learn this stuff well, I need problems to solve and exercises to do and I’ve found tons. Thank you internets, you are the best for all you offer for free!
In case anyone is wondering, here’s my list of resources that I’m using:
The other thing I ran across today was this from Jeremy Keith and it just reinforced my decision to learn Vanilla JavaScript rather than jQuery – there may be many times where that is much more appropriate or easier.
I also want to thank the folks who have encouraged me, you know who you are, and it has kept me going. (Especially some help from down under!)
I have a secret, it’s not a shocking one, don’t worry. And yes, it does have to do with front end web development. Well, here it is, I really dislike JavaScript. When I say that, I don’t mean that it’s just not my favorite thing to do in my job, I mean to say it is at the very bottom of the list. For years I have bought books, I have read articles, I scoured the web for blog posts, and yet when I am confronted with a JavaScript issue, I cringe. I put it off. I do everything else first. And usually, I ask a coworker for help. For some reason, JavaScript just doesn’t stick with me.
I have talked to all kinds of people about it, gotten advice from coworkers, other conference attendees, experts in the field, listened to talks, and yet I still struggle. Many have said to me, learn pure JavaScript first, that way you will understand what the library is doing for you. Others say to just go with jQuery, it will make life so much easier. I have tried both approaches and right now, I am again going back to just plain jane JavaScript. I’m reading up on Crockford, I’ve bought yet another huge book on the subject and am trying to tackle it in bits and pieces at a time.
For me, CSS is so easy, so elegant, so understandable. I know what’s happening with it, I can write it out quickly and even as it becomes more complicated with new modules, I seem to pick it up so much easier than JavaScript. But I see the future in many of the new things happening, I see where things are going with canvas, SVG, and more and it is only going to get more complicated. I feel the need to get my brain to think a bit more like a programmer. To do that I must finally tackle my nemesis of code.
So the goal? Learn JavaScript. Not jQuery, but JavaScript. Be able to sit down and write out some easy functions to get something to work. The hard part for me is always coming up with what I want to try and do. I need a solid project to work on to drill the skills home. After that, then I will start with jQuery, hopefully I will understand better what the library is doing for me, so that if it can’t get the job done, I am better equipped to find another way. My hope is that as the field of web development advances, this will help me keep up and still have the same fun I do with CSS. Still feel like it’s magic to write lines of code and then open a browser and see it work. I know there will be a lot of frustration along the way, but now is the time. I’m telling you all this, well, because I need some accountability and because I’m open for any suggestions you may have, so send me some tweets and let me know what you think. I hope in the coming months to follow this up with some of what I’m learning and doing.