Should I learn/become proficient in Javascript?

Question

I am a .NET webdev using ASP.NET, C# etc... I \"learned\" javascript in college 5+ years ago and can do basic jobs with it. But I wonder if it is useful to become proficient in

Answer 1

Make sure you add these sites to your bookmarks:

Mozilla's developer site: This contains the reference to the Javascript API in Mozilla. This will help you make sure you're writing code that Firefox understands.

IE's site in Microsoft Developer Network: The same, for IE.

W3's reference of DOM for HTML: In most web applications today, the Javascript code manipulates the DOM, which is an internal keeping track of the objects displayed on screen (but you already knew that, right ?) This is the reference to the DOM API. It is language neutral, which means it does not target Javascript, but these methods exist in Javascript too.

Douglas Crockford' site: Doug Crockford is THE MAN when it comes down to Javascript. The articles in his page are a must read. Because Javascript has closures and first-class functions, he believes it is closer to Lisp and Scheme than to other languages. And he teaches you how to greatly improve your code with these language features.

Yahoo Developer network: You may also want to check this. I'm not a regular visitor to this site, though, so I can't really say much about it.

Answer 2

Unless you want to really get into javascript, I think you'd be better off learning enough JS to leverage one of the tried and tested javascript libraries out there.

Answer 3

If you're involved with the Web in anyway then the answer is "Yes, always". Maybe an embedded or system's programmer could get by without JavaScript, but not a webdev.

Most of the libraries are designed to alleviate some of the pain of interacting with a multitude of browsers. They will not abstract away core JavaScript functionality.

Answer 4

If you are doing web development then at some point you are going to get exposed to Javascript or ECMAScript at some point in your career for any one of a number of reasons. At a minimum you should know enough Javascript to be able to be able to validate user input; however, the web is moving in the direction of using more an more Ajax so you should also know enough Javascript to properly leverage one of the major libraries out there such as jQuery.

As some of the other users have noted, you can learn most of what you need of Javascript on a day to day basis in a single day or a couple of afternoons. If you want to get more advanced with Javascript then you are going to have to invest much more time in learning the language but odds are that unless you seek out this type of work that you are not going to encounter something that a preexisting library doesn't already exist for.

Answer 5

I recommend Jeremy Keith's books: DOM Scripting and Bulletproof Ajax. After you become more fluent in JS I would recommend a JS library(I use jQuery, but that is not important).

JS is important to learn. You cannot use a framework without the proper understanding of how it works. That is doing things backwards.

Answer 6

Yes, definitely learn Javascript before you learn one of the libraries about. It's the whole walk-before-you-can-run thing.