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JavaScript

Posted by Christopher Debove
Christopher Debove
Courses Plus Student 18,373 Points

jQuery dependency all over

Hello,

I was asking myself after seeing some JavaScript courses. Do they all depend on jQuery. I don't have anything against third-party libraries. But jQuery is for me the cancer of the web when coding new generation website.

Almost all (if it isn't all) is doable via vanilla JavaScript. I would hope to see more of pure JS workshops...

If there isn't do you know if there will be some in early future?

4 Answers

Steven Parker
Steven Parker
243,134 Points
Steven Parker
Steven Parker
243,134 Points

There are plenty courses that use pure JavaScript.

I don't have any actual statistics, but I've taken many of the JavaScript courses, and I seem to recall that most of them used plain JavaScript. I mainly recall jQuery in the courses specifically about it, or ones on topics where it's pretty much standard practice (such as when doing AJAX).

But it's generally very useful for rapid development and creating compact code, so I'm curious why you would refer to it as "the cancer of the web".

Christopher Debove
PLUS
Christopher Debove
Courses Plus Student 18,373 Points
Christopher Debove
Christopher Debove
Courses Plus Student 18,373 Points

For many people jQuery is a way to not learn how to do things in plain JavaScript. For example AJAX like you said is a "standard" practice.

In my point of view, i'm mostly here to solidify the basics, and see more of the use and deep mechanisms of javascript. Like functional programing, observer/observable. Algorithm exercices.

Another example: There's a long course on OOP in JavaScript. But it's missing a courses on FP (immutability, filter, map, reduce, high order functions, etc...)

Steven Parker
Steven Parker
243,134 Points
Steven Parker
Steven Parker
243,134 Points

I do think I've seen at least some of the concepts you mentioned in courses here, but I don't recall which.

And I get your point about jQuery, I'd just never thought about it that way since I didn't learn it myself until I was already very familiar with JavaScript. But as I said, you'll find plenty JavaScript courses here that do not use jQuery.

Stuart Wright
Stuart Wright
41,120 Points
Stuart Wright
Stuart Wright
41,120 Points

I agree that it's bad for people to try to learn jQuery before understanding programming/JavaScript fundamentals, but I don't think Treehouse promotes that at all. The Beginner JavaScript track has plenty of vanilla JS content before introducing jQuery near the end.

https://teamtreehouse.com/tracks/beginner-javascript

Christopher Debove
PLUS
Christopher Debove
Courses Plus Student 18,373 Points
Christopher Debove
Christopher Debove
Courses Plus Student 18,373 Points

Oh ok, i'll will figure later then. jQuery was the third course of Javascript in the track "Front-End Web Development" (after basics and loop/arrays/objects).

Yeah I didn't saw the JS Track so I was surprised to see jQuery before AJAX for example, or even some notions of ES6 in front-end track. But JS track seems more oriented on plain JS. I'll look for that after the front-end track. I'll hope to enjoy it. By the way I'm interested in all of the courses.