Javascript book recommendation needed

[Paul Makepeace]

On Fri, May 16, 2008 at 11:40 PM, Paul Mison <lists at songtwo.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> 2008/5/16 Mehmet Suzen <mehmet.suzen at physics.org>:
>> Couple of weeks ago, my brother has suggested me this :
>>
>> http://extjs.com/
>>
>> looks promising...anyone tried this before?
>
> Well, firstly, given a discussion on learning the JavaScript language,
> I'd hardly recommend a library. That's like someone asking how to
> learn Perl and being shown Moose. (This analogy may be flawed.)

I think it is flawed to the extent that Perl actually works out of the
box whereas JavaScript doesn't, inasmuch as diff browser
implementations render (har) for example dealing with events in any
meaningfully cross-browser way almost impossible.

For sure focus on core ECMAScript, but the moment you want to start to
do something useful don't hesitate to lean on a library to do it. Not
only that using a library will encourage you into better JavaScript
practices.

I don't think you should be writing non-trivial JavaScript these days
without using a library. Integrate it into the learning process, is my
advice.

P

> Secondly, extjs has been kicking up a bit of controversy with its
> licensing strategy, if you can call it that; it seems more like a
> flail. Here's a critical take:
>
> http://pablotron.org/?cid=1556
>
> As he says, all the cool kids use jQuery.
>
> --
> Paul Mison
> http://husk.org/
>