obfuscated.org

I spent Thursday and Friday at work essentially without fingers. Well, I had fingers, but only one useful hand of them. Interestingly enough, I learned that I’m at least in the short term incapable of hunt-and-peck typing. Finger muscle memory takes over when I try and everything goes all crazy-go-nuts. Not a good time.

My original plan for my convalescence was to go charge a book on JavaScript to the company account and see if I couldn’t learn a bit about a language that I’m likely going to use for an upcoming project. However I don’t know what the good JavaScript books are, and walking to the book store is a lot more work than surfing the internet, so I checked for good online resources.

It turns out that there are many. In particular, Yahoo!’s YUI team has put together large collection of videos about JavaScript. I watched videos of three of Douglas Crockford’s lectures: “The JavaScript Programming Language,” “An Inconvenient API: The Theory of the DOM” and “Advanced JavaScript.” All three were good lectures. They were, for shots of a lecture about a programming language, well produced, and Crockford’s talks were well structured. I got a lot more out of the first talk than the other two, but that could arguably be couched more as a compliment for the introduction video than a knock on the other two, as I felt like I knew the language pretty well after it. (I’d never used the language seriously before.)

I didn’t get too far in to any of the other videos, but there are a ton of them there, so there’s got to be at least a few more good ones. If you’re looking to pick up JavaScript, I can recommend the YUI Theater as a good place to start.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 20th, 2007 at 5:25 pm and is filed under Programming, The 'Hoo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.