Notes on Teaching JavaScript
Notes on Teaching JavaScript by Ian McCracken is a thoughtful post about the author’s experiences teaching JavaScript to a web designer. It made me realise how useful our Let’s Make a Framework series of posts could be.
McCracken says:
Nothing, however, teaches you JavaScript quite so well as rolling your own cross-browser Ajax utilities, and so I studied the source code of Prototype and script.aculo.us and MochiKit, and now I’m a far better programmer than someone starting out today might be forced to become.
I’ve found the same thing in the past. If you’ve ever worked on a project where you can’t use a popular framework, you suddenly have to learn a lot very quickly. Browser differences are a headache, which is why I’m glad these frameworks exist. What really shapes these libraries is JavaScript itself.
Creating a simple library turned out to be a fantastic learning exercise: it requires investigation of namespaces, presents plenty of scoping problems to overcome, and requires attention to consistency, organization and sane API design.
Have you ever written a guide to basic or fundamental JavaScript techniques?
