JQuery for Complete Beginners: Part 1 | Hacker News Reader

JQuery for Complete Beginners: Part 1

1stwebdesigner.com

36 pointskisoofasa12 comments

Maybe it's snobbish, but I think if you need that kind of low content tutorial, you are not yet a Hacker, and should perhaps look for "beginner news" instead (and I don't even call myself a hacker). Let's raise the bar ever so slightly beyond "Hello World"?

It may be interesting to systems people who have never done front-end work so I wouldn't say it's not interesting to hackers by and large.

I'm sure all the Haskell guys want to gripe about the weekly "monads explained by pictogram" posts. :)

Honestly, I wouldn't worry about it and let the voting take care of it.

I don't think it's snobbish at all. I see these articles on HN from time to time: 25 Awesome jQuery Tips, Learn YUI Tools Now! and they always appear from some random blog that just seems to aggregate links from other sites.

I love jQuery, but I come to HN to learn about the internals of jQuery, or some other awesome optimization John Resig has squeezed out of JavaScript, not how to select all the div's in my document.

You're right, this article isn't for HN.

Oh my, dude, please, who on earth are you to teach complete beginners when you're this incompetent?

be sure to download the minified version, as it reduces the strain on your server.

Oh really?

The second, and prefered way, is to include it from Google’s Content Delivery Network, or CDN for short. There are two main benefits to doing it this way. Firstly, we can make sure we are always using the most recent version of the library

Utterly useless reason.

and secondly it means your server does not have to load the file and it takes up less bandwidth

...and what about that if every website used Google's CDN, then the library'd already be in their cache and so your page loads faster for them?

However, I stopped reading when I read this:

For example, to select all divs on my page, it’s as simple as: $(‘div’).

This makes me think you're not incompetent, instead you're a hilarious evil genius. What on earth are you doing breaking newbies' brains by typing crap with backquotes? Did you write this guide in MS Word or something?

Ignoring the spew of vacuously snarky comments, the point about the back-tick quotes is valid (aside from how poorly it was expressed).

I think some people use some blog tool that likes to make things "pretty", so it replaces assorted characters with things like smart quotes and such. This pretty much hoses things for anyone trying to cut and paste code.

If you do like using smart quotes but want to preserve code I would recommend http://daringfireball.net/projects/smartypants/

I really like how the Ruby Best Practices blog imports code from Gist, for anything more than a few lines.

it's a 17 year old's blog and he got on hn. he's not doing that bad - cut him a bit of slack. none of your "points" are devastating (even the quote was an exception; the majority of the code is formatted very nicely).

having said that, i used jquery for the first time last week (to make that greasemonkey script that zaps karma info here) and there's plenty of info out there if you just google for it. so i have to agree it's not really "hacker news".

I'll admit that I was a little bit harsh... well, no, very harsh in my original comment. That said, I'd fed up of dealing with the results of spreading misinformation in beginners' articles. It's great that this 17 year old writes well and gets on HN, it's less so that he'll be causing people to make mistakes and misjudgements in future.

yeah, i understand. i just imagined him reading and felt bad :o)

I must admit that I didn't read the article, instead I came directly here. I have worked with jQuery enough to have read lots and lots of simple introductions. The stuff that usually trips me up is knowing which files I need to download, host, then import into my page to get something working.

In java we have things like automatic imports in eclipse, dependency management with maven etc. When I go to the javascript frameworks it seems like these are somehow 'boring' little details that nobody writes about.

This whole thing reminds me of learning Spanish. When you go to a book store there are hundreds of intro to Spanish books. Maybe because they are easy to produce or maybe because most people pick up an intro book and never get beyond that.

What might be nice is if google could be customized to the point where it knows my skill level in various subjects and returns results that I will find interesting.

If not this post, are there posts or resources that people on HN would strongly recommend for those that are looking to get started with jQuery?

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