Frameworks (arguably) make building complex applications easier, but they make doing simple stuff more complex.
And that’s why I think people should learn vanilla JS first. I’ve had many students who tried to learn frameworks get frustated, quit, and focus on vanilla JS.
Some of them have gone back to frameworks later, and told me that knowing vanilla JS made it a lot easier for them to pick up frameworks afterwards.
Chris Ferdinandi is a machine!
A vanilla JS roadmap, along with learning resources and project ideas to help you get started.
Some more useful snippets of JavaScript. The functions and helpers are particularly handy if you’re weaning yourself off jQuery.
Another deep dive into web history, this time on JavaScript. The timeline of JS on the web is retroactively broken down into four eras:
Nice to see “vanilla” JavaScript making a resurgence in that last one.
It’s 2017, the JavaScript ecosystem is both thriving and confusing as all hell. No one seems to be quite sure where it’s headed, only that it’s going to continue to grow and change. The web’s not going anywhere, which means JS isn’t going anywhere, and I’m excited to see what future eras bring us.
This is such a great perspective on what it’s like to build for the web over the long term. The web will always be a little bit broken, and that’s okay—we can plan for that.
The Web has history. If you build with web technology it will stick around. We try not to break the web even if it means the mistakes and bad decisions we have made in the past (and will make in the future) get set in stone.
Here’s a handy directory of scripts that set out to solve one problem without any dependencies. Useful for poking at, picking apart, and learning from.