M Spreij

One of the things I try to keep in mind is that by not doing what I’m supposed to be doing, I’m actively sabotaging the chances my future self has of accomplishing something worthwhile.

Not that I’m not procrastinating right now.. I have a way to go yet..

Via jQuery I got back into JS, the examples showed what’s possible here and there.

Douglas Crockford (senior JavaScript Architect at Yahoo!) has a bunch of videos that explain some key concepts behind JavaScript, and its history, all of which I ehr, plan to watch :-) But the parts I did see were quite excellent, and some things I couldn’t wrap my head around before suddenly clicked!
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=douglas%20crockford%20javascript

More good stuff to read here: http://javascript.crockford.com/

And here’s a fine reference: http://developer.mozilla.org/en/Core_JavaScript_1.5_Reference

They say the best way to learn a language is to find a pet project for it, something to write in that language. For me that happened after finding (besides various jQuery stuffs) the HTML 5 Canvas element, and realizing I could – finally – easily try out and play with things like the Chaos Game, cellular automata, bifurcation diagrams, fractals.. Early attempts: http://mech.cx/canvas.php
This was so much fun! :-D

Added a snippet to Wikipedia also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierpinski_carpet#Using_the_Chaos_Game

I find http://eloquentjavascript.net/ to be quite helpful, it’s simple but not ‘dumb’ from the start, and explains things like closures, functions as a type of variable and ehr.. stuff like that, better than me :-)

ps. I’m pretty good with PHP/SQL (freelancing), and JavaScript turns out not to be the toy language I thought it was ;-)