JavaScript libraries are like calculators for Web developers
Don’t let the zany title fool you. There really is a point to this post if you bear with me for a few minutes. Still here? OK, here goes…
I taught high school math for about five years, so I had ample time to observe calculators being used as a crutch. In some cases there was nothing I could do about it because the curriculum or standardized tests stated that the students were free to use them. However, when I had my way, I would ban them from the classroom… for a while. Why do you suppose I would do a crazy thing like that?
The main reason was that I felt (and still feel) that math students need to understand everything that is going on behind the scenes when they press a few buttons on their calculators. Whether it’s long division, solving a quadratic equation, or computing an integral, I believe it’s important to learn to do it by hand first. This gives students a far deeper understanding of mathematics and also is a great confidence booster to know that one can solve complicated problems with nothing more than pencil and paper.
Once my students had mastered a concept, I would let them use their calculators. My theory was that once a concept is understood, there is nothing wrong with automating it. One could choose to do it by hand, but that would be inefficient and silly. Unless, of course, you do mathematics for recreation (yeah, there really are people like that).
So what does this have to do with JavaScript libraries? The good libraries out there (Prototype, jQuery, mooTools, etc.) automate most if not all of the mundane tasks people used to have to do by hand. They essentially abstract away the nitty gritty details and, as Prototype puts it, “make JavaScript suck less.” People can now do very impressive things with just a few lines of code. Of course, being who I am, I want to know what the proverbial man behind the curtain is doing when I’m using cool stuff like the $() function.
In that spirit, I plan to take a behind-the-scenes tour of the three aforementioned libraries starting with jQuery. I will download the latest version, study every line of code, and read a lot of documentation along the way. As I go along, I will report my findings here. And when I’m done, I won’t feel guilty about using any of the libraries because I’ll understand how they work. Once a math teacher, always a math teacher…
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3 Responses to “JavaScript libraries are like calculators for Web developers”
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This seems to be an useful post. Also if you could compare the learning curve, browser compatibility and code bulkiness of the 3 namely Prototype, jQuery, mooTools it would be great.
Great idea. I'll go ahead and do that. Maybe I'll even run some performance benchmarks while I'm at it.
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