As part of of my post 2016 Goals for GIS, web and myself, I mentioned learning some fundamentals on JavaScript.

  1. Learn more fundamentals and take a class in JavaScript, perhaps at General Assembly or elsewhere. More and more of geospatial is moving towards the web. While I think I’ve gotten a good handle on Python (Esri and FOSS4G) for GIS on the desktop, I really need to get more into web programming. And rather than concatenatively learning JavaScript, perhaps it’d be worthwhile to learn it in a classroom from an expert.

Ideally, I’d like to take a class, but right now I’m in the midst of Machine Learning class at Columbia Data Science and missed a few classes due to being stuck traveling during the late January winter storm in New York City. However, I have started on the JavaScript & jQuery book and find the design and simplicity of the @wagonbooks to help with learning in a way that sometimes online documentation does not. Author Jon Duckett has conveys a visual understanding of programming that I have not seen elsewhere.

books

Web Design with HTML, CSS, JavaScript and jQuery Set - $34 (each book is almost $30 on its own, so $34 is a steal)

This two-book set combines the titles HTML & CSS: Designing and Building Web Sites and JavaScript & jQuery: Interactive Front-End Development.

screenshot

The books feature easy to read graphics and images that nicely explain the code and the concepts.