Comment by GrandMasterBirt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by GrandMasterBirt | Hacker News Reader

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GrandMasterBirt

I feel in all cases of this questions (say RoR vs Ruby) the answer must ALWAYS be "learn the language first, then learn the framework". If you don't you will do the following:

a) Write bad code (you barely know the syntax)

b) Get really confused, and thus either start hating it, or simply not able to take full advantage of the framework.

c) Do roundabout ways to solve a problem when there is a very simple solution, but you not understanding the language still made the mistake.

d) Hit a big brick wall when looking at code others made.

I made this sort of mistake before. It is a bad mistake to make.

However to note: jQuery makes dom manipulation fairly easy. It is in no way a replacement to javascript, only the browser's dom lib calls. You just wind up not writing a bunch of utility functions to handle the different ways to get at the same information in the browser. Plus I like the syntax.

However to note: jQuery makes dom manipulation fairly easy. It is in no way a replacement to javascript, only the browser's dom lib calls. You just wind up not writing a bunch of utility functions to handle the different ways to get at the same information in the browser. Plus I like the syntax.

Right, browser based JavaScript is kind of a special cases, the reality is that it can be a frustrating experience to even learn JavaScript without the aid of something like jQuery to smooth out the DOM.

My personal recommendation would be either learn JavaScript outside of the browser, chose only one browser to learn it in, or get "the Good Parts" as recommended, but start with jQuery and use "the Good Parts" to make sure you are doing it right while using jQuery.

The fact of the matter is, if you are doing browser work, which most doing JavaScript are, you are going to use a toolkit like jQuery in almost every project. So to me, it becomes almost part of learning the language. JavaScript toolkit are a little different from frameworks on the server side. They are more like language enhancers than a frameworks. So they are in kind of a "chicken and the egg" problem when it comes to making recommendations on which to start with.

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