JavaScript

In late 2005 I started trying to learn javascript... after several years of messing around with Java I found javascript to be more comfortable, coming from a Perl background. I took an online class with netglearning which was near useless and the test had bogus questions on it. What I found was that the basics of the language was pretty easy. The DOM was the tricky part, and I was used to languages with symbolic debuggers and more traditional command line interfaces (i.e. you can always add debugging printfs). I finally started to get it once Firebug came out!

Best Practices

In my reading, it seems like most writings about javascript focus on technical details, often specific to a certain browser. There seems to be a distinct lack of resources about how to write good code.

Exception Handling

There is little written about this beyond the basic mechanics of try, catch and throw. Despite seeing a lot of code which does a throw with a string it seems that a new Error() object should be created. These objects seem to variate amongst browsers.

Error()
	IE 6	Firefox 1.5
name	Error	Error
number	0
description	blank
message	blank	blank
fileName		name of file
lineNumber		line number
stack		text representing a stack trace
Error(msg1)
	IE 6	Firefox 1.5
name	Error	Error
number
description	msg1
message	msg1	msg1
fileName		name of file
lineNumber		line number
stack		text representing a stack trace
Error(msg1, msg2)
	IE 6	Firefox 1.5
name	Error	Error
number	Number(msg1)
description	msg2
message	msg2	msg1
fileName		msg2
lineNumber		line number
stack		text representing a stack trace
Error(msg1, msg2, msg3)
	IE 6	Firefox 1.5
name	Error	Error
number	Number(msg1)
description	msg2
message	msg2	msg1
fileName		msg2
lineNumber		Number(msg3)
stack		text representing a stack trace

See also: [ECMA 262 Standard]

Resources

• http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Programming:JavaScript -- when I read this in early 2006 it was pretty incomplete
• http://www.quirksmode.org/
• http://jibbering.com/faq/
• http://www.w3schools.com/
• http://www.ajaxpatterns.org/

Things of Interest

• http://simile.mit.edu/timeline/
• http://w3schools.com/dhtml/tryit.asp?filename=trydhtml_timeimage
• Walter Zorn is brilliant: http://www.walterzorn.com/tooltip/tooltip_e.htm
• http://digg.com/tech_news/Firefox_Canvas_based_First_Person_Shooter_
• http://www.codeproject.com/jscript/graphic_javascript_tree.asp
• http://code.google.com/p/jsdoc-2/