JavaScript Learning Resources

The approach to JS in Hype is oriented towards people who are already highly proficient in JS. I have years of high-level experience in Lingo (which is not all that different from JS) doing game design and so on, so I understand how things work. I just don’t know the JS-specific terms and such. Rather than spending months mastering all aspects of JS (including ton’s to stuff I do not need to know) I am looking for something that is more task-oriented and more Hype specific.

Can anyone recommend cookbook-style learning resources that will make it possible for me to get up to speed in a timely fashion?

Thanks.

Lingo! I know that language a bit as well. :smile:

Check out the latest JavaScript Cookbook from O’Reilly. It’s task oriented, but it also includes some useful tips and suggestions for syntactic structure, and doesn’t assume you’re either a genius or an idiot.

Here’s a few more resources.

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This guy moves pretty fast, but he makes it fun (and since the lessons are videos, you can pause them when needed)

http://thatjsdude.com

Thanks Daniel, Warren, Greg.

I’ve got the Cookbook.

One of the things I loved about Macromedia was that they provided both a very well-written manual for Lingo and a particularly valuable dictionary with multiple examples of everything, both being some 275 pages. The nice thing about this kind of printed documentation (and the dictionary in particular) is that the entire content is instantly available in a second by fanning pages and it was easily 30 times faster than online documentation. And because of the way the content was designed, even newbies could start producing serious, usable scripts within a couple of days and get their projects out the door. I’ve been sniffing around JS / JQ for several years, looking for a way to get going at a low level and building up, learning while on the run (and without adding too many hours beyond my 60 hour work week). The only way to do it is to shut down business for a fair portion of the work week, focus on learning the whole thing, then start figuring out the specific things you need for specific jobs. I was spoiled by Macromedia, as the documentation was so well thought out that you could learn what you needed for a task and then add the depth over time.

I have six major sites to develop over the next couple of months and for my purposes the combination of Hype, JS and a web design app are the best solution.

You can download the Hype Documentation here

Heh. Well, perhaps relative newbies. Remember Direct-L? Some astonishingly painful questions were asked there.

I think you're on to something, though; Hype's a flexible engine and there's no immediately obvious way 'in' to it. What I mean is that there isn't an immediately obvious starting place, the first thing you do to begin scripting or creating some kind of sequential set of scripts. In the world of Director, that was the frame script. Hype's nearest equivalent is probably onSceneLoad, but that's not always immediately obvious.

Later versions of Director also shipped with an internal, interactive doc engine that provided syntax examples on the fly. The trouble here, though, is that JS is vastly expanded beyond its core functionality, and more is being added all the time by external libraries such as JQuery - so a single exhaustive reference engine is probably beyond the scope of … well, anyone.

That's got nothing to do with Hype or Tumult; JS has been evolving under the influences of various browsers, other third parties, and individuals and group of developers for, oh, a couple decades at least, and there's not a whole lot of central guidance.

It's easy to do a dictionary of a language you've created from scratch, but much harder to do a good comprehensive top-to-bottom ref on something that's continually growing.

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