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Comment by addflip | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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