rmurphey

Announcing jQuery Fundamentals: An Open-Source jQuery Training Curriculum

I've been leading jQuery trainings for more than a year now, from tiny gatherings that I organized myself at the local coworking space, to intensive two-day sessions at local web companies, to whirlwind one-day classes at governmental agencies. Over the course of those trainings, I've developed what I'd like to think is a decent curriculum -- training material that's the size of a small book, exercises that demonstrate core concepts, and solutions to those exercises that students can peek at later or when they get stuck. I decided recently that it was time for all of this material to see the light of day, so I spent the last several days converting it all to DocBook files that allow for easy publication to HTML and PDF (and other formats, if I'm later so inclined). I also fleshed out some topics that I'd given short shrift, and started planning sections covering advanced topics such as plugin authoring, code organization, best practices, and more. There's more to come in the next few days, but I think what I've done so far is worth sharing. I hope you'll agree.

• Full HTML version of jQuery Fundamentals book
• "Chunked" HTML version of jQuery Fundamentals book
• GitHub repo (exercises, solutions, and book source code)

My goals in releasing this are several. First and foremost, I want to see people writing better jQuery. The free resources for learning jQuery are scattered across the internets, and my personal experience of learning the library was haphazard — it was a long time before I learned some things I wish I'd known from the get-go. In addition, I want people who are writing jQuery to understand JavaScript. To that end, the book begins with a survey of JavaScript itself before jumping into jQuery. Finally, I want to enlist the bright minds of the jQuery community to help developing a robust, authoritative, in-depth jQuery curriculum, and in exchange it only seemed fair to make it available to everyone. I should mention that the goal of this material is to serve as a companion to a human instructor. That said, individuals may find it useful for self-study, especially if they're diligent about doing the exercises at the end of each chapter. If you're inclined to help -- by adding a chapter, a section, a paragraph, an exercise, or even just a correction -- fork the repo and send me a pull request. I look forward to seeing how this project might evolve with the community's help. Note: If you comment on this post pointing out an issue with the material, I will do my best to tend to the issue, but I probably won't publish your comment, as this post isn't the right place for reporting issues in the code. You can report issues at the repository, but if it's important to you, please fork the repository, make the change, and send me a pull request.

35 comments

Leave a comment...