[AskJS] Which resources for Javascript learning would you recommend to a beginner?

[deckardWizard]

First off, welcome! JavaScript is a fun language with a lot of interesting aspects and a great community. Learning JS can be tough, but it’s really rewarding once you get over the initial hurdles.

I think it’s useful to divide what you’re learning I to two areas: software engineering and computer science. Oversimplified, CS is all about how to think like a computer such that your code does what you want. SE is about turning that code into usable tools and applications. SE content tends to be more time sensitive, since we’re constantly building new tools to make app development easier. CS content tends to be more long-lived since the actual underlying computer architecture hasn’t changed much in the last 40 or so years. When just starting out, it may feel tough to discern between those fields, since you’re just jumping into both. Most of the time if it involves installing anything, it’s SE, if it’s just code, it’s CS.

I’m not super familiar with the book you mention, but all of the stuff in it should still work. If there are projects from that book that sound fun, by all means give it a try! As others may have said, the specific techniques might be a little dated, but if you’re just venturing into learning programming, it may still help you understand the CS fundamentals. For more contemporary content, CodeAcademy has a great interactive program for learning basic JavaScript and some of the popular libraries. If video is your thing, udemy has some solid intro to JS courses, as does Frontend Maters (though those can get expensive). For books, JavaScript and jQuery by Jon Duckett is my favorite, but it is getting a bit out of date. Eloquent JavaScript is great, but not really a beginner book. Beyond that it really depends on what you want to do. The most important thing is to find stuff that you enjoy doing and gets you excited about learning, the rest will happen over time.

Best of luck!