Where to begin?

Hmm. Also without the pretentiousness of poetry. That title doesn’t roll off the tongue. Two words in a row starting with “en” is a bit awkward.

I hope to change that and become a front end “ninja”.

Apparently the term “ninja” seems to be appropriated by jQuery itself. “Rockstar” also seems taken, but since you don’t want to kill people in the night-time or spend all night drinking, partying, doing drugs and sleeping all day, you might have to settle for “front-end engineer” (term used by PPK) which has the utility and skills mentioned without the pretentiousness of “expert” or “superstar”.

Though “code nazi” is always appeeling. Like bananas.

Indeed, reading a book is one thing… you learn the theory and syntax etc, and it’s good to have a reference to fall back on. If you don’t practice, you forget all this again.

But to really get it, you should test excercises yourself, from scratch, fall and start over again. And with this forum your learn a lot. :slight_smile:

It depends on what you’re looking for. I would say that if you’re looking at developing a career in web development, then it definitely helps to specialize. I have a lot of experience in front-end design and middlewear, and I know I’ve lost job opportunities because my interviewer had difficulty categorizing me; that’s one of the reasons I try to find out exactly what they’re looking for in advance so I can pitch my skills the right way.

If you have more flexibility than that, then my advice would be different. Follow what interests you, get out there and build projects for others and / or that interest you. Nothing helps to push you to learn new things (which obviously motivates both of you), like trying to build something you’ve never done before. Sometimes this can be part of work, but most clients I’ve found are not interested in projects just because they’ll be fulfilling for you. So don’t be afraid to jump in and build a project that interests you.

Re: JS vs. jQuery.
IMO you need to know Javascript no matter what, but jQuery has almost become a part of mainline JS at this point. I don’t think you can call yourself a JS programmer if you can only string jQuery actions together. jQuery automates some great stuff, but at the end of the day it gives you functionality and you have to be able to program in order to do anything really useful with it. On the flip side, I don’t think anyone would take your JS skills seriously anymore (especially if you’re looking for a job), if you don’t use jQuery.

Many times this kind of popularity happens because of a fad, but I think jQuery will stick around (look how long it’s lasted already compared to it’s original rivals). jQuery is not really a framework the way I understand it, though there are a lot of plug-ins that do provide some software architecture. jQuery is really just a function library; that’s why it’s been so successful. Instead of locking you into a particular architecture, jQuery lets you roll your own custom code as you like, or you can call a jQuery function if that will get the job done for you. It’s not like the .NET framework or a lot of the Java / PHP open source frameworks out there that provide you a lot of structure, but eliminate an equivalent amount of flexibility.

I’m kind of in the same boat. I’m a jack of many trades, and a master of none :slight_smile:

Thanks Ralph for your response. If I were to go the route of a front end developer would you recommend learning JS or a framework such as JQuery? Not so sure I even understand the difference yet.

You won’t need in depth PHP knowledge to customize a WordPress installation. If you want to write a plugin, you’ll obviously need more, but for basically using the WP “API” the PHP skills are basic. Calling functions, passing arrays etc.

Similarly jQuery will abstract a lot of the complexity of JavaScript away for you. You’ll want to be familiar with how the DOM, events and XHR calls work, so you know what jQuery is doing when you ask it to do that stuff. jQuery is massively convenient, and can make your code more robust because of cross browser issues, but you should have an idea of what jQuery is doing (and not just think of it as magic).

HTML can be related because it creates the DOM that you’ll interact with with JavaScript.

Excellent and informative. I greatly appreciate it.

There’s always SitePoint’s JavaScript Reference and the Sticky threads in the [URL=“http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=15”]JavaScript Forum have some helpful information.

And there’s the JavaScript Live course.

Yep, same here. Mostly due to my job as it requires me to wear many hats. In fact my main job is to produce print projects, such as catalogs and fliers but my passion has always been web which I luckily get to be a small part of now.

I hope to change that and become a front end “ninja”.

While experience in all the above is very handy, many advocate some kind of specialization. You can make a good living specializing in Design (= web designer), or CSS, HTML, JS, Accessibility (front end developer) or PHP etc (back end developer). It’s up to you and your nature which you incline towards. Sounds like the middle option is best for you, but it’s your choice. With the rise of wonderful CMSs like ExpressionEngine, you can create very dynamic and sophisticated sites without knowing a jot of PHP, which is why the middle option is most attractive to me.

The best way to go it to learn JavaScript, but it takes a lot of work and time to learn it properly. jQuery is a collection of complex bits of JS code pre-written for you (and optimized to work on all browsers), making it much faster to get complex behaviors happening. The downside is that you are less likely to know how it all works. It’s not a bad tradeoff, though, at least in the short term. If you want a sliding gallery on your web page, for example, you’ll find that someone (or many people) have put one together for jQuery, and you can just plug it in and hey presto. If you had to write the code for that yourself, you’d be working for days or weeks.

W00t! I can do a drop shadow, a glow and bevel and emboss. Hang on while I register my web design company…

Off Topic:

Markup Cat would get paid more due to the slightly higher awesomeness inherent in the name…

My job title: Markup Monkey and Occasional Ad Banner Maker

There are no qualifications for web design and development. At least none that are endorsed by a standards body or are considered of any real world value by the industry as a whole. In fact, stuff like the CIW qualifications are pretty much considered a big joke. I agree with you however that titles in our industry are one huge mess, you’ve got no barriers to entry, people calling themselves stuff because it sounds “cool” and large numbers of people unable to backup their experience level. :slight_smile:

I have no idea on web design.I have an expert who designs my website. Sometimes i pay quite a lot of money to get this done.I will soon learn how to do it on my own.