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Comment by krelian | Hacker News Reader

I never understood why certain books who are covering a framework or a very particular aspect of programming must start with what is basically a short tutorial about the programming language they are using. Maybe it's just me but I always assumed that someone who buys a book about JQuery already knows Javascript and if he doesn't a short tutorial just isn't enough. Take a look for example at [Hacking - The Art of Exploitation](http://nostarch.com/hacking2.htm), a great book that deals with stuff like buffer overflows, network sniffing and shell code injection but starts with a tutorial about C...

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  Maybe it's just me but I always assumed that someone who
  buys a book about JQuery already knows Javascript and if he
  doesn't a short tutorial just isn't enough.

There were many to come to Ruby by trying Ruby on Rails first, and I think there are many to discover Javascript by having to accomplish something with jQuery. Of course that's not the ideal way to learn things, but your assumption is often wrong.

Do you really think these people properly learned Ruby by reading a Rails-specific book with a 10-page overview of Ruby?

There's some good business in picking up Rails projects when a client discovers they've hired someone who really only knows how to wire up pre-coded plugins to auto-generated MVC code, and cannot custom-code special requirements.

Personally I think YAGNI can apply to skill sets as well.

I refused to learn JavaScript until JQuery came along. Why would I want to waste my time on some unevenly supported scripting language that (pre-AJAX) was mostly used for silly animations or client-side form validation? JQuery has since made learning JavaScript enjoyable.

I learned javascript and jquery at the same time, and it turned out to be a lot more efficient for my purposes rather than learning pure javascript first. So for newbies I think there is benefit in including the general language tutorial first

Ditto, I learned javascript via jquery and didn't understand the difference until I decided to put a few weeks aside to go through the spec with ES4 in hand. Highly recommended.

http://www.ecmascript.org/download.php

It's good that js has a formal spec and an insanely accurate reference implementation. Keeps browser vendors on their toes.

The question here is, it is a tutorial on C or programming? If it is a tutorial in C I can see the point in it. I, for example, now what a buffer overflow is, but don't really know C. So if I want to read that book and understand the code samples, a short tutorial would help a lot.

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