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General Discussion

Posted by Don Shipley
Don Shipley
19,488 Points

JavaScript, JQuery

Following the videos I can follow what the instruction is doing with the coding. However to try on my own I can not write the code. In JQuery I do not understand where to look up commands such this or select etc. What should I do to understand more, to where I can write my own codes? Is there a track to just learn JavaScript, JQuery, PHP etc?

2 Answers

Kevin Korte
Kevin Korte
28,149 Points
Kevin Korte
Kevin Korte
28,149 Points

Don, I struggled with this for a long time. It only get's better the more you make attempts at it. If you're like me, you'll feel like you'll never be able to do anything outside of what the videos show. Eventually, you'll get the wheels turning enough that you'll be able to do more and more. What you're going through I think is very normal.

As far as references, the manuals for these languages are where it's at.

For jQuery: http://api.jquery.com/ For PHP: http://www.php.net/manual/en/

I don't really have a great resource for Javascript. I use Stack Overflow a lot for JS bits. But I find myself very rarely not using jQuery to do things over JavaScript. I figure if I'm going to add the weight of jQuery, I might as well take full advantage of it.

Don Shipley
Don Shipley
19,488 Points

Thank you, I will keep at it watching the videos etc. Trying to read codes from either api.jquery and php.net is very confusing not knowing code. I do not really know which languages needed to be a developer. I know I need JQuery to perform slide shows and PHP for data base functions such as forms etc. HTML5 and CSS3 seem to be the easiest of the bunch :)

Adam Moore
Adam Moore
21,956 Points
Adam Moore
Adam Moore
21,956 Points

I agree with Kevin, I felt lost at first, and still do on quite a bit of the concepts with jQuery. However, after some tinkering around and CONSTANTLY failing, you'll occasionally get something right and then the idea will click and you'll begin to understand bits and pieces here and there until you have a decent grasp on some concepts, upon which further learning will build. What I tried doing, along with using the same tools and sites that Kevin mentioned, was form a very simple code and try it out and see if it worked, both on the screen and getting something to print to the console (i.e., using $(".my_div").height() to print the height on the console log to see how I could use this structure to get the height of "my_div" to use in other areas).

Don't give up. Start small, mess around to see what works and what doesn't, change small things in a code after it works to see what changes, and you'll begin to understand. Eventually, the intro concepts will become very simple and you'll be able to move deeper in your knowledge and usage of jQuery. I'm still a beginner, but it's really exciting the more I learn and can understand and use. Keep it up!