Code(r) (In)Complete

What a nice week I’ve had at work. My main client gave me the week off, so I’ve been working on a side project along with training and planning for the coming year.

On today’s training menu, we have TekPub’s Rob Conery talking about JavaScript. His “you already know the syntax (or should) so let’s talk about weird stuff and best practices” approach was just what I needed today. He does a great job of walking through the examples to demonstrate clearly the weirdnesses around coercion, == vs. ===, the concept of ‘falsey’,  assumed globalization of variables, hoisting, namespacing, this scoping weirdness, revealed module pattern, closure, the semi-colon insertion quirk, unobtrusive JavaScript, a quick demo of CoffeeScript, wrapping it all up with a few words about testing… very few, Jasmine is recommended and there will be a video up soon, according to Rob.

He quickly instructs on how to get the JavaScript debugging features running for IE, Firefox and Chrome, then uses the Chrome tools throughout the demo. I took a moment to download Firebug and make sure I could open my demo HTMLwith JavaScript page up in each browser. Following along while Rob demoed, I mostly used Chrome, but occasionally dipped into the other browsers so I could be aware of any differences. The intermission demo was about JSFiddle.    This tool has me a little excited.  What a great way to try out snippets of JavaScript and JQuery and CSS before dropping them into a larger script file.  I’ll definitely keep it in my toolbox.  I’m also pleasantly surprised at how useful the debugging tools in Chrome/Firefox/IE are.  Being able to interact with the loaded DOM directly through the console is a lot like using the Immediate window in Visual Studio, one of my favorite debugging tools.

Resources and tools mentioned:

TekPub’s Javascript: Up To Speed video

JSFiddle, JSLint

JavaScript, JavaScript, a wordpress blog by Angus Coll

FireBug

Google Libraries API – Developer’s Guide

Jasmine

Backbone.js

batman.js

knockoutjs

CoffeeScript

nodejs

TextMate (the text editor used in this video)

Tags: JavaScript, JQuery, TekPub

This entry was posted on Friday, December 30th, 2011 at 10:25 pm and is filed under cool, very cool, kewel g33kstuff, software development. 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.