A Beginners' Guide to Learning JavaScript? [closed]

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There's a few mentions of Javascript newbies getting starting by checking out some of Douglas Crockford's work (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11246/best-resources-to-learn-javascript), but none of his resources seem to be for those looking to learn from the ground up.

Are there any suggestions for complete beginners regarding how best to learn JavaScript?

Personally I have plenty of HTML and CSS experience, and some PHP (which would help learning JS), but for those that don't know any programming language what would you recommend?

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I would recommend:

• Eloquent JavaScript (interactive tutorial)
• A re-introduction to JavaScript
• Mozilla JavaScript Guide
• Javascript Tutorial for beginners

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I have been using the tutorials in Learnable.com from the Sitepoint folks, Lynda.com, and Tutsplus. These are all paid services, but I learn lots from them. The Codecademy Javascript Fundamentals tutorial/class definitely gets a thumbs up. Codecademy is real time, challenging and free.

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Code Year also has a great program for ground up learning!

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I have been working my way through Codecademy's offerings, specifically, "JavaScript Fundamentals", the "non-track courses" in JavaScript, and, as mentioned above, their current "Code Year."

I am coming at it from the perspective of someone who used to write *nix shell scripts and C and Fortran (yes, yes) code for a living a while back, and who lately has been doing some basic HTML/CSS, so some parts were obvious. Most of it, though, was new to me, since I had pretty much no experience with object-oriented or event-driven programming.

On the whole, I have found it very useful. It can be a bit frustrating getting your answer to a particular exercise to "pass," because the validation process appears to be sensitively dependent on the individual "teacher's" ability to write good checks, but this is only a minor complaint. Mostly, this is not an issue, and the already-posted answers on the forums on the site are quite helpful if you're stuck. Generally, though, doing what you're asked will get you a happy success message, and I really like the interactivity of it all. It's not perfect, of course, but I feel like I'm getting a good introduction to the key points and concepts of JavaScript; enough, at minimum, that I can speak enough of the language to know how to Google/Stackoverflow things more precisely. And really, I feel like I'm getting a lot more than that -- the dumb ideas I've had for little utility scripts are becoming a pleasure to implement.

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http://www.w3schools.com/js/default.asp

As ground up as it gets.

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"Javascript, the good parts" is very good, but you need to have some theoretical background or some serious programming experience to put it to use. It is a bit high-brow. However if you have had programming courses during your education it will be fine.

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I have been learning from: http://www.informit.com/library/library.aspx?b=STY_JavaScript_24_hours

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I'd say W3Schools is a pretty good tutorial for someone with no programming experience. But as soon as you finish that, start working through Crockford's material, and unlearn all the bad stuff you learnt.

I don't know of any introduction to JavaScript that follow's Crockford's good parts, but he says in the introduction to his book that he'd like to write an introduction to JavaScript at some point, so fingers crossed!

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Head First Javascript is an excellent book for beginners. The Head First series does a great job of breaking things down to the basics, but still covering a lot of ground throughout the book.

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There are NOW some good interactive tutorials for learning Javascript right from the beginning. If you are fairly new to Computer Programming, try Code Avengers (a site I helped create) or CodeCademy. Both are free and get you to write code right from the beginning.

If you have a some programming experience, try Code School. It has courses for html, css, Javascript and JQuery. However, they do cost about $50 a course. Learners watch fairly entertaining video tutorials then complete programming tasks.

My experience in learning and teaching others to program is that these type of sites can be both and effective and enjoyable way to learn programming. Probably in conjunction with other resources.