jQuery Learning Center

DigitalSea · on Feb 22, 2013

Finally. Where was this handy resource five years ago? Everything I learned about jQuery in the early days was from other developers, Resig's blog and through exploring the jQuery code itself and lots of trial and error. This is great, especially the articles I can see on the Widget factory which is something not a lot of jQuery users actually know exists and is extremely helpful for correctly developing more complex plugins. It's good to know what the jQuery team considers to be a best practice considering the amount of conflicting resources out there.

baby · on Feb 22, 2013

Does it really need it? It feels to me that jQuery is simple enough.

diggan · on Feb 22, 2013

Let's not teach anyone else swedish because it's simple for me.

btipling · on Feb 22, 2013

The bits on performance are interesting:

http://learn.jquery.com/performance/

Although the bit about variable definitions on one line under performance is absolute rubbish: http://jsperf.com/variable-definition On chrome it's the same, on Firefox their suggestion is slower. Added an issue, https://github.com/jquery/learn.jquery.com/blob/master/page/...

The best way for a software engineer to learn about jQuery in my opinion is to look at the source code though.

ithcy2 · on Feb 22, 2013

Yes, the variable definitions page leaves me scratching my head. Not sure what it's doing under performance. Surely that's a matter of your personal coding style and I'm not sure a jQuery tutorial site should be so dogmatic about how you choose to define your variables when there's negligible performance impact either way. Although JSLint loves to complain about the "old & busted" style, grouping variable definitions together with commas goes against the principle that inserting a new line of code anywhere should be "safe". If you paste in a new variable definition statement with a semicolon in the midst of a group of comma-separated lines, you're going to break things.

The bit on "clever conditionals" is rubbish as well. Not only are the "better" ways much slower, they're much harder to read. I opened an issue for this one: https://github.com/jquery/learn.jquery.com/issues/258

ihsw · on Feb 22, 2013

Indeed, some of them are basic optimization techniques that experienced jQuery users have 'discovered' over the years (through Google or otherwise) and they are essential to creating high-quality web applications.

Having a central resource is obviously a boon to the entirety of the community and it reduces the barrier to entry, and I personally know some designers (who get by on the bare minimum of jQuery knowledge) that would benefit greatly from this service.

mattmanser · on Feb 22, 2013

It seems to be giving advice which is contrary to the very purpose of jQuery. Take:

http://learn.jquery.com/performance/append-outside-loop/

I always do something like this:

    $target
      .append($("li")
        .class("thing")
        .text(someText));

But it's not mentioned at all.

Instead they are using the verbose monstrosities from the DOM API which is exactly what we don't want to use because it sucks.

i.dontWantToHaveVerboseMethodsToAppendSomethingToTheDom(please).

Without the easy DOM manipulation, jQuery's not much more than a nice wrapper to deal with AJAX browser differences. There's some serious cognitive dissonance here.