looking for goodtutorial

[alexander]

hi,
can someone point me to a good JS tutorial? (it may be in German or
English)
regards
alex

 

[Dr J R Stockton]

(e-mail address removed) said the following on 8/29/2007 6:54 AM:

Not meaning to be obtuse, but, there aren't any "good" ones. The best
JS resource you will ever find is where you posted to and the archives
for this group.

The reason is simple though. Tutorial sites do not get instant, public
feedback when they tell you something wrong. You post bad, incorrect,
poor scripts in c.l.j as a response and you can believe - with your
life - that it will get corrected.

Learning javascript from a newsgroup is a long and tedious process, both
for the learner and the experienced users.

Those experienced in other programming languages can learn a lot (about
half of it being good, unless care is taken) by looking at the script
driving the simpler ordinary Web pages.

Much Web tutorial material is worse than useless, being written by
ignorant amateurs, or written long ago, or both. An example of the
former was recently announced here in c.l.j & elsewhere.

Books at least are generally written by professional programmer/authors,
are edited before publication, and are often revised which removes many
of the earlier errors. Choose a book from a respected technical
publisher, one which has gone through several editions and which assumes
on the part of its readers an appropriate degree of intelligence. Check
what you read against ISO/IEC 16262, PDF available at no cost on Web.

 

[Laurent vilday]

Randy Webb a écrit :

Trying to find how something works is a lot easier
to find in the archives than anywhere else. And, a well worded search
will tell you just about anything you want to know about JS.

I totally disagree, your reasoning is too english centric !

Searches with english words are a huge pain for people like me which are
not speaking well the language, especially when you don't really know
what you looking for.

 

[The Natural Philosopher]

Randy Webb a écrit :

I totally disagree, your reasoning is too english centric !

Searches with english words are a huge pain for people like me which are
not speaking well the language, especially when you don't really know
what you looking for.

Ah.. the perennial 'man page' issue.

Man will tell you everything you didn't want to know about a given
command, but it doesn't ever tell you what command you want in the first
place.

I used to do software support. In the end it was 'read page 127 of the
manual: the answer is in there' for 90% of support calls on one product.

I got the people to put in a sheet with Big Letters on it with each
package we shipped, which was a retype of that page's crucial
information (basically that running Word over a network requires more
than two file handles!!!)

 

[David Golightly]

Dr J R Stockton said the following on 8/30/2007 12:19 PM:


No, most are written by authors. The main purpose of which is to make
money, not educate the readers.

Despite perennial grumbling about it, I have yet to see a cogent
argument outlining specific deficiencies in JavaScript: The Definitive
Guide (5th Ed.) by David Flanagan, published by O'Reilly Media 2006.
I highly recommend it as a desktop reference.

If, and only if, they employ a programmer in that field to
review/edit/correct the books. Too many books available prove that is
far from true or they wouldn't be full of the bad practices they are
full of.

JavaScript: TDG (5th ed.) was reviewed by Douglas Crockford, Norris
Boyd, Peter-Paul Koch, Christian Heilmann, Ken Cooper, Todd
Ditchendorf, Geoff Stearns, and Sanders Kleinfeld. Reviewers of
previous editions include Brendan Eich and Waldemar Horwat. Anyone
who's worth their salt in JavaScript is familiar with and esteems at
least half of those names.

-David

 

[Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn]

David Golightly said the following on 8/31/2007 2:52 PM:

The FAQ has been changed and I will post a new thread to announce it.

So far for the FAQ of this newsgroup being a reflection of the consensus of
the regulars of this newsgroup. Aside from Douglas Crockford, I have never
seen any of the aforementioned persons to post to this newsgroup, and I have
yet to see a statement that gives an indication about the current consensus
that this book recommendation should remain in the FAQ (given the number of
bad examples from it posted here to date). There has not even been a
strawpoll to back this up.


PointedEars

 

[David Golightly]

So far for the FAQ of this newsgroup being a reflection of the consensus of
the regulars of this newsgroup. Aside from Douglas Crockford, I have never
seen any of the aforementioned persons to post to this newsgroup, and I have
yet to see a statement that gives an indication about the current consensus
that this book recommendation should remain in the FAQ (given the number of
bad examples from it posted here to date). There has not even been a
strawpoll to back this up.

Do you have any examples of posts that illustrate "bad examples" from
the above book? I'd be interested in seeing them.

-David

 

[Dr J R Stockton]

In comp.lang.javascript message <[email protected]>,

And where do you suppose a newbe looking for a decent book is going to
find out where to check against? And, ISO/IEC is a joke when it comes
to trying to learn JS.

The word, albeit horrible, is spelt "newbie".

We are not discussing newbies in general, just that special subset that
read the FAQ. The FAQ should have links leading to the ECMA and ISO/IEC
standards.

If you were better able to comprehend English, you would have understood
that I was not recommending using the standards as tutorials; that is
what books are for. But newbies should realise that no one source is
entirely reliable - I recently read, for example, that Apophis is 240
miles wide - and, having got a general idea from the book, it can be
helpful to look at what the standard says, even if one does not yet
fully understand all of the latter.

As an example from elsewhere : the on-line Help of a PC language gives
264-1 as the limit of an ARCTAN2 argument. A newbie might well deduce
that it should have been ((2 superscript 64) minus one) and had been
electronically mis-copied. Reference to the FPU data proper would show
no support for any limit (one may not understand it all, but one can see
when something like that is absent) - and, indeed, all possible 10-byte
float pairs are correctly handled in hardware (I've tested a sufficient
range of finite ones myself), values up to over 1.0e4951. And ISO/IEC
15.8.2.5 is easily seen to show no limit other than those of Number
itself (and to differentiate where appropriate between +0 and -0).

An example from javascript : many sources give the zero of a date object
as 1 Jan 1970 midnight. Midnight is ambiguous and GMT/UTC is essential.
The standards clearly show UTC, misuse "since", but do say "beginning".

And if a newbie is not going ever to find the standards useful, it's
good that he/she discover that as soon as possible, before committing to
a choice of career.

 

[Dr J R Stockton]

Randy Webb a écrit :

I totally disagree, your reasoning is too english centric !

Searches with english words are a huge pain for people like me which
are not speaking well the language, especially when you don't really
know what you looking for.

Try putting your question in your preferred language, and using Google
Translate, Babel Fish, or a dictionary to discover English words.

OTOH, put a few common foreign words such as "avec" in the query, and
ISTM that there's much in Foreign on the Web.