Alexander Beletsky's development blog

My profession is engineering

JavaScript, HTML and CSS.. I need it!

I’ve never been working close to UI during my career, neither as Win32 developer nor as Web developer. I was focused on business logic and architecture rather than user interfaces, moreover developing UI was not the best things that I liked to do.

In my previous job I met javascript first time. It wasn’t in context of web application, but rather a custom logic for desktop software. It was very unusual to me, since I’ve had few experience with dynamic languages. But as I met javascript closer, more and more and like it. I find dynamic languages are more flexible to describe objects. With no static check you could not rely on messages from complier, if you have a mistake on you code, it is only runtime than you catch it, so it forces you to do unit tests. Unit testing in dynamic languages is more simple and easy to use. You can do any type of mocking, construct a tests objects in run time, easy emulate user interface events.

As soon as you good C# developer, understand ASP.net/MVC, RDBMS, enterprise applications design, your values is less, than you lack a HTML/CSS when you do web. I’ve never treated HTML/CSS as important skill, thinking as I needed I could learn it in 1 day. I was wrong, it not so easy as I thought. Of cause, they are declarative, with no logic, conditions, runtime, but they are languages and requires respect. Sure, it is not so difficult to start with some HTML/CSS than with C#/ASP.net, but as always - experience matters.

Some years ago, I’ve started to play a guitar a bit. Tuning of guitar was the greatest problem I had, before I’ve been presented with tuner device. With a little bit experience I was able to tune slightly untuned guitar.. so if some string is close to tune, I could adjust it. But if it is totally untuned, I just could not catch it up. I’m having the same issue with HTML/CSS and JavaScript now. I could do fixes, create something simple, add something to existing application. So, I could adjust. Problems begins then I try to do something from scratch. I spend to much time, looking for examples and tutorials to do really simple things (especially with CSS). I could not tune.

I want to improve my knowledge in this area, now I understand that I really need it.

I want to ask you today, what resources, books, online tutorials you use and recommend for HTML/CSS/JavaScript area. What was you experience of education it it?