Many of us have benefited from Xah Lee’s Emacs Lisp tutorial. I found it very useful for learning the Elisp library and idioms. Now Lee has put together a JavaScript tutorial.
When I was learning Elisp, I had the advantage of already being familiar with Common Lisp and Scheme so I understood the Lisp parts. It was just the Elisp specific bits that I needed help with. In the case of JavaScript, I’m a complete novice as I don’t know the language at all. It’s enough like C that I can get a general idea what a simple program is doing but I certainly couldn’t write in JavaScript or even understand anything harder than a toy program.
That makes me a perfect test case for Lee’s tutorial. I’ve gone through the first section (8 lessons) and learned a lot. I don’t have much interest in writing large JavaScript programs but I would like to have enough facility that I can read and understand others’ work and write my own (possibly simple) programs when necessary.
It’s still too early for me to say I’ve reached that goal but I do understand some of the things that confused when I looked at JavaScript scripts before. If you’ve been wanting to learn JavaScript, Lee’s tutorial is an easy way. You can go through a lesson or two a day in just a few minutes so it doesn’t require a large time commitment. Perhaps I’ll write a followup post after I finish the tutorial. In the meantime, I’m enjoying it and learning a bit of JavaScript.