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Comment by pavs | Hacker News Reader

I want to start learning Javascript (total beginner with few months experience with PHP), can you guys recommend me some good books suggestions as to what frameworks I should get in to?

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Elequent Javascript is a fantastic book and one that'll give you a great start in programming for the web. I've also had luck with Envato's Javascript Fundamentals Course[1]. Richard Bovell also put together a course for learning Javascript[2]. These, of course, are not frameworks, which isn't what you want right now anyway.

1. https://tutsplus.com/course/javascript-fundamentals/ 2. http://javascriptissexy.com/how-to-learn-javascript-properly...

Personally I'd suggest you learn the basics before looking at frameworks. Frameworks will muddy the water and you won't be able to tell why/where magic is happening.

I only want to echo what others are saying: avoid frameworks in the beginning. Frameworks will only confuse you. Learn basic programming concepts using the core language only. Eloquent JavaScript is a great book to use.

Yeah I second aidos sentiments. Stay away from frameworks especially jQuery. Check out the first version of this book and CodeAcademy's js course.

jQuery is more of a library than a framework, and I don't see anything wrong with starting with it, since most of what it hides is the warts of the DOM API, not core Javascript concepts. I think the other replies were worried more about Knockout/Angular/Backbone that do a lot more hidden magic and can make it very unclear what's part of the language and what's part of the framework.

The reason to avoid jQuery while learning is that it teaches you to use javascript lazily as an afterthought to get a DOM element to do what you want quickly. It doesn't encourage you to learn a single thing about javascript.

I don't know about that! People were writing terrible JavaScript to perform DOM-manipulation magic long before jQuery came around.

I think it has more to do with how people see JavaScript, i.e., whether JavaScript is a general purposes programming language or just a tool to make cool things happen on web pages, than it does what framework they do or don't use.

jQuery is essentially a better DOM API than the native API. Hence it focuses on DOM manipulations, which, despite all we've learned about other important pieces of client-side webapps, is still an important piece itself.

jQuery won't help you much with architecture, but then again, neither will your text editor, and it's about as guilty as your text editor or the native DOM API of helping you learn JS or use it effectively.

jQuery does hide core Javascript concepts. For example, the for loop in jQuery it is totally abstracted out into $.each.

That's more so a core programming concept than a js concept.

This is an example of one of many functional abstractions that jQuery (carefully) adds to Javascript.

There are great functional examples in Eloquent Javascript, that show you how to go from low-level loops to high-level abstractions. That's EJ's triumph: it guides you through the mental leap you have to make to go from for loops, to useful enumerations like maps and folds and the like.

I see programming as a means to an end. For me, that end is creating interactive websites. For this reason, I found Eloquent JavaScript to be very boring. Most of the book talks about using the language to solve contrived, silly problems like keeping track of your aunt's cats. It got interesting only towards the end, when it started explaining how JavaScript can be used to actually DO things in the browser.

I would recommend Codecademy instead. I like it a lot because the courses consist of short parts where it first describes what you are going to do and why, and then makes you do it. You then see the fruits of your efforts on the mini-browser immediately. For me that was huge, because it is much easier to put the stuff you learn into context when you are seeing the results right away.

Eloquent JavaScript would be great if you want to get down to the knitty-gritty details of the language. But I would argue that not everyone needs that level of detail at the beginning.

edit: not sure why I'm being downvoted...

Derek Sivers great guide to learning Javascript: http://sivers.org/learn-js

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