Foreword
It was once said, “JavaScript is the only language developers don’t learn to use before using it.”
I laugh each time I hear that quote because it was true for me and I suspect it was for many other developers. JavaScript, and maybe even CSS and HTML, were not among the core computer science languages taught at college in the Internet’s early days, so personal development was very much based on the budding developer’s search and “view source” abilities to piece together these basic web languages.
I still remember my first high school website project. The task was to create any type of web store, and me being a James Bond fan, I decided to create a Goldeneye store. It had everything: the Goldeneye MIDI theme song playing in the background, JavaScript-powered crosshairs following the mouse around the screen, and a gunshot sound that played upon every click. Q would have been proud of this masterpiece of a website.
I tell that story because I did back then what many developers are doing today: I copied-and-pasted chunks of JavaScript code into my project without having a clue about what’s actually happening. The widespread use of JavaScript toolkits like jQuery have, in their own small way, perpetuated this pattern of not learning of core JavaScript.
I’m not disparaging JavaScript toolkit use; after all, I’m a member of the MooTools JavaScript team! But the reason JavaScript toolkits are as powerful as they are is because their developers know the fundamentals, and their ...
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