JavaScript: The Good Parts presentation

Last week I gave a presentation at Michigan State University to a group of students who have a passion for web development. Many of them are experienced with HTML and CSS, but are just getting introduced to JavaScript.

This talk covers some of Douglas Crockford’s “JavaScript: The Good Parts” book.

Douglas has also posted his slidedeck online if you would like some more information. I removed some of his slides from my talk due to its introductory nature.

One of the students in the audience asked for more resources about JavaScript. During the presentation I recommended W3Schools, but after further thinking I realized there are just too many poor recommendations and incorrect statements on W3Schools website. I found a good list of places to grab resources from on w3fools.com:

I wanted to follow up with resource that your members can get more information. This list is from w3fools.com:

• HTML Dog is a fantastic and comprehensive intro for HTML and CSS.
• Opera Web Standards Curriculum covers the basics of web standards-based design in HTML and CSS.
• Google’s HTML, CSS, and Javascript from the Ground Up presents the basics of web development with video tutorials presented by Google’s expert web developers.
• SitePoint is a pretty good reference for HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Their documentation always mentions feature support across different browsers, and describes known browser bugs.
• The W3C, itself, has a wiki-based general Learn page as well as an HTML element reference.
• The MDC (Mozilla’s Doc Center) takes over at intermediate CSS and covers JavaScript better than anyone.