I recently got a job for the summer developing PHP. It's been a few years since I've been involved, and I can see that Javascript has become a bit more advanced. The company I work for in particular likes to use "Ajax" and other stuff in their sites.

I don't need to be really proficient in it to do my job, but I'd like to know the technology as well as I can. Obviously I can google it, and I have done so, but I want to know from people who perhaps have learned the stuff where I should go. I don't need online sources only as my boss is willing to pay for any books that I need.

The real trick is that I already know OOP from PHP, and I am comfortable with programming concepts in general. I mostly want a series of articles to get me a bit more acquainted with JS syntax. After that, if anyone knows of a good site that has a fairly complete reference of predefined JS objects and methods, I would appreciate it. Any other pieces of advice are welcome.

http://w3schools.com/ has always been a good reference for me. Also, some good used books off Amazon.com is another good source.

http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/JavaScript

http://jibbering.com/faq/index.html

If you wanna look at AJAX scripts to study them,

http://www.dhtmlgoodies.com/index.html?whichTutorial=ajax-basics

Almost all JavaScript tutorials and books are rubbish and I wouldn't ever trust the information on w3schools.

Some of the decent JavaScript guys:

http://www.crockford.com/javascript/
http://www.themaninblue.com/
http://www.dustindiaz.com/
http://ejohn.org/

Frankly though, I'd just use the jQuery library for everything since it makes every really easy and has a lot of really useful plugins available.

Why wouldn't you trust w3schools? Out of the numerous years I've used them I've never found them to be incorrect about anything...

Well the basic concept behind AJAX, is that you are using Javascript methods client-side to request data from a server, usually from PHP, Java, or even static.

The core functions for requesting the data are basically the same in every instance, so you can probably put it into a library, though if the company uses it often, they probably already have something for it.

In way of dealing with the data afterwards, usually you'll be replacing the innerText or HTML of a div tag or something. Other than that, its basically expanding it across a variety of uses and types of data.

For basic js, pick up a basic javascript book at the book store. For AJAX, you'll want to pick a library like Detty suggested. jQuery is fine, prototypejs.org is okay, too. I prefer jQuery so far. Once you pick the library, you can go to their site for reference.

They can be inaccurate about a number of things, actually. They're also very slow to correct things on their site. Sometimes they don't even cover an entire concept (I've found this with CSS) because they consider it deprecated, when it's still supported by the language.

Uh, what? I've never seen anything like that. And as far as I'm aware, nothing has been deprecated with CSS.

Stop asking for facts and examples. WTF is wrong with you?

I'm a slow learner :saddowns:

I don't have much experience with the W3C site, but since W3C tends to be kind of :downs: it wouldn't surprise me if what Kirby and Detty said was true.

Where does is say that w3schools is run by w3c? It's not.

Just for the record, I use w3schools as a reference all the time and never ran into anything wrong. But I use it for basic stuff, nothing fancy, and never javascript.

I've only used w3schools for basic stuff myself. Its content is too lacking for anything beyond the basics. You're better off just buying a book on Javascript for more in-depth reference.

mind = blown