Help promote better JavaScript documentation with the Promote JS campaign

As Douglas Crockford has noted in the past, JavaScript is misunderstood. JavaScript does have it's flaws but it is incredibly expressive and powerful. The good parts outweigh the bad.

As Doug points out there is a lot of bad information out there about JavaScript there are some better books around these days, but online it is still hard to find good JavaScript documentation if you don't know where to look.

The Promote JS campaign is trying to change that. They are trying to get people to link to good JavaScript documentation in order to improve it's prominence in search engines. The above banner is linked to the Mozilla Development Center's JavaScript guide, which is a great resource.

MDC's reference section is a great resource and occupies a large percentage of the links in my JavaScript bookmark folder. String, Function, Array, Object and the DOM reference are just a few of them.

Yahoo! provides lots of great info on their developer network sites. In particular the YUI Theater has great videos not only about YUI, but also videos about JavaScript in general. Particularly good is the video series Douglas Crockford has there.

Patrick Hunlock has a great series of articles on JavaScript. They cover all sorts of things like numbers in JavaScript, JavaScript arrays, strings in JavaScript. He also has one of the better articles I've found online about closures in JavaScript, a concept that can take a while to wrap your brain around but is amazing once you understand it. Stoyan Stefanov's book Object-Oriented JavaScript remains the best source for understanding closures IMO. It's probably the best book I've found for anyone just learning JavaScript. The closure stuff starts on page 80, but if you are new to JavaScript I suggest reading the book from start to finish.

I encourage anyone who wants to learn more about JS to explore the above resources to improve your knowledge. And of course, get involved with the Promote JS campaign yourself to help those new to JavaScript to more easily find good documentation!

(Note: The above links to the books "Object-Oriented JavaScript" and "JavaScript: The Good Parts" are Amazon Affiliate links. No matter the method you use to buy them, I do wholeheartedly endorse them both; these books should be in every JavaScript programer's library.)