Summer of JavaScript

Though we’ve continued to unofficially meet up every week, Denver Code Club hasn’t had an event scheduled for awhile. The co-organizer, Matt Steele, and I took a few months off, examining the state of our careers and carefully considering which directions we wanted to go. We’ve reorganized and come up with an official plan of attack: Summer of JavaScript.

Unfortunately, the last book that we studied as a group, jQuery Hotshot, proved to be more debugging than actual learning. We knew we wanted to continue learning JavaScript and both of us have experience with the language, but neither of us felt we had a complete understanding of it; much of what we have learned was picked up in pieces along the way. Matt chose to review the Head First JavaScript Programming book while I wanted to pick up where I left off in the 8-week How to Learn JavaScript Properly course I had started last fall.

We devised an aggressive schedule for members of the Meetup group to gather each week and review the beginner/intermediate topics in hopes of picking up details that we may have missed and hopefully solidifying our knowledge. After reviewing the basics in July, Denver Code Club will begin studying Zakas’ new Principles of Object Oriented JavaScript book in August, followed by Osmani’s Learning JavaScript Design Patterns book. O’Reilly is still a sponsor and, once again, they have generously supplied books, coupons, and other swag for us to raffle off to the group.

I’m pretty pleased with the group of local web developers Matt and I have cultivated over the last year. It’s pretty awesome to learn with and from others who want to further their careers in the same direction. It’s clear that JavaScript – after a long period of stagnation – is experiencing a rapid gain popularity in recent years. Developers are using it in creative new ways, libraries, frameworks, and devices – it’s not going away anytime soon and I’m eager to master it.