How important is Javascript?

There isn't a JavaScript track at this time, but there is some training in the Front End Web Development track. There has been some newer material released, and more on the way.

I should note that the extra resources I've mentioned are not designed to teach you JavaScipt, they teach you Angular.js (which kind of assumes you know a bit of JS) so they probably aren't the best recommendations but...

Inline with some of the other answers here, I would get through some treehouse javascript lessons and then maybe go peak around these frameworks like backbone & angular to see how Javascript can apply in the real-world on the cutting edge of web development. Seeing these frameworks helped motivate me to learn the parts of javascript I needed to learn (and treehouse helped a lot with that).

You could also add Frontend Masters and Code School to the list.

Daniel Lewis , wow, I must be old :P There used to be a set of javascript videos that went over variable declarations, data types, functions etc... I guess that was before the "Tracks" revamp at Treehouse.

jQuery and AJAX are nothing but JavaScript frameworks. When you're using them, you're using JavaScript

I am aware they are libraries, but still. You can do the same thing with jQuery as you can with just plain old JS, but it will take you a lot more code to do it in JS.

As someone who earns his living from JavaScript, I can admit that a lot of seemingly negative things can be said about JavaScript: it can be confusing, it can be complicated, it often acts differently from what you're used to in other programming languages, browser idiosyncrasies can cause a lot of problems, sometimes it's counterintuitive, its name is confusing and so on.

However it's anything but worthless. JavaScript, for better or worse, has become de facto lingua franca of the web. No other language has ever achieved such market penetration.

It's available in any modern (and not so modern) browser, making it practically the only programming language you can be sure is found on any computer (device). It's often used for scripting inside applications that aren't browsers. In fact, when OS X Yosemite is finally released, you'll be able to use JS for scripting on the OS level.

If you take the time to really understand JavaScript, it's an extremely rewarding experience. It's a powerful language that borrows a lot from functional programming patterns. It's object-oriented in a way that no other modern programming language is (forgoing classes and letting the developers interact with the objects directly).

It can be used both client-side and server-side, and in conjunction with databases that use JavaScript for interaction, you can produce whole web apps in a single programming language.

Most of the negative things that I've listed in the first paragraph of this post are actually subjective opinions belonging to developers who have entered the JavaScript world with some preconceived notions about the language. Historically, JavaScript has rarely been a first programming language for developers, so they often had issues when it looked like a language they were used to, but behaved in a different manner.

jQuery has done a lot of good things for the web, but sometimes I think it's done a lot of wrong to JavaScript, too.

The idea that jQuery can help you reduce the amount of code was certainly true 7 years ago, when browsers had poor support for certain technologies.

We live in a different time now, though. Thanks to increased compatibility and rapid development (and excellent work from browser dev teams), vanilla JavaScript has become more efficient in terms of the amount of lines of code.

And, it's always been more efficient computationally speaking, after all, you don't have the overhead of an almost-100kB library (the size of production jQuery uncompressed).

I think a lot of the "jQuery is more efficient and saves me time" statements are a result of poor understanding and sometimes outright laziness on the part of developers.

In any advanced web app, even if you use jQuery, you won't be using it for everything. It often obfuscates what's truly happening with your code, at times it still doesn't act the way you'd expect vanilla JS to act, and sometimes, it can even be too slow.

i don't want to sound harsh, but I believe that dissing a programming language, while recommending a library built on top of the same language shows a great lack of understanding of that language and development in general.

Also, AJAX is not a library, it's a group of technologies centred around the asynchronous nature of JavaScript, through the use of the XMLHttpRequest API which is available as an object with the same name inside of JavaScript (defined as a property of the global window object).

I apologise if I sounded too harsh, but some of these misconceptions have been deeply rooted in the web development community and it's up to us to eradicate them, creating a better working environment for all of us.

Well thank you Dino Paškvan. That was actually very imformative. I will definitely keep that all in mind. I've never heard an actually good or compelling argument as to why using JavaScript is a good language or is better than jQuery, other than "It's useful because apps! / It's good to learn...because...yeah." or such.

I didn't think it sounded harsh :) Just truthful.

There's a really good answer on Stack Exchange on this very complex question.