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Jimmy Walters
6,245 PointsJavaScript = The Gates of Hell JS is something ive known about for years, this is like the most begginer stuff right?
I've known ABOUT JS for many years, i know that it is used 90% of the time to give any website all really cool flash and dash. Not to say you can't do nearly everything JS can do with scss and sass, but being that i've seen sass and scss, you pretty much have to know JS already to understand them cough.... making them fairly superfluous.... cough. Nevertheless this course is like the "i'm terrified of the behemoth JS, and need to move toward it Millimeters at a time" right? I mainly ask because ive seen JS and it look like scrambled garbage, compared to every other prog. language ive ever seen. I assume part of it's due to the fact the language was written in like two weeks only, but is it really as bad as it looks? Is it one of those things you never really get down 100% (like Java, python, html, etc) or does it just take a REAAAAALY long time to become proficient at it?
1 Answer
Marcus Parsons
15,719 PointsHey Jimmy Walters,
The course you are taking is designed for ages 9-14, and it says so right underneath the top title and description of the course. I'm going to assume that you don't fall into that category, so you should start somewhere such as JavaScript Basics with Dave McFarland.
JavaScript, in my humble opinion, is one of the easiest languages to learn. It is extremely lenient with what it allows you to get away with compared to what I've seen in other languages (unless you tell the compiler explicitly to be strict). And to make writing it even easier, you can use jQuery which is absolutely wonderful for simplicity and cross browser compatibility.
JavaScript is also very powerful, though. With the HTML5 and CSS3 specifications, you can make programs that rival, and even replace, desktop applications.
The "scrambled garbage" you've likely seen out in the wild of the web is developers hiding their code by obfuscating the language. You can write it very clean and neat to where it's easy to follow, or you can write it to where you think it should go in a trash bin somewhere when you look at it. But, you can use a tool such as JSBeautifier to "beautify" any "scrambled garbage" you see.