In my opinion, when I looked at JavaScript, it looked like not my cup of tea. When I came across jQuery, I loved it. I sat and watched Nettuts+ 15 days of jQuery screencasts, 1 year later and now I'm fairly confident I wouldn't develop a website without including jQuery's library.I have never felt this has held me back but my question is, will this come back and bite me in the ass one day, the fact that I didn't have a solid JavaScript foundation before jumping feet first into one of its best (if not the best) frameworks? Did anyone else take this approach?
How necessary is it to learn JavaScript before jQuery?
programming languages;learning;self improvement;javascript;jquery
jQuery makes it easier and shorter to write JavaScript code. But jQuery does not replace JavaScript by an own language.If you use jQuery, you don't need to know some things like how to find an element based on its id or its name, or how to loop through the <li/> elements of an <ul/> list (since you can easily do it with jQuery: $('ul#ListNameHere li').each(function() { });).But even if you use jQuery, you still need to know how JavaScript works, and how to do things jQuery doesn't do for you. It means that you must know:the language itself (how to use arrays, what are closures, etc.)the non-jQuery things (calculations, for example).Last but not least, if you intend to write jQuery code on professional level, you should know JavaScript as well (including things that jQuery does for you), in order to write optimal code, not being stuck when there is a bug, etc.