How many?

[Learning]

Hi.

I was just wondering how many objects/commands you need to know for most of Javascripts capabilities?

Thanks a lot

:)

[Nicodemas]

There are simply too many things to know, in my opinion.

My suggestion, is learn functions, event handlers, arrays, conditional statements, loops, and the document object model. That's about as far as I really cared to go, save for some really wonky stuff that was part of special applications I was writing. knowing those gets me through 99% of the projects that come down to me.

[Charles]

Essentially, you are asking: "If I already have a pair of pliers, do I really need a wrench?" Any programming or scripting language is a tool box and unless you are at least familiar with all of the tools in there you will end up using the wrong ones for the task at hand. Take a look at the thread http://forums.webdeveloper.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=3911. The enquirer is using 30 some lines of code to try to solve a problem that I solve in 2 lines because he or she is only familiar with the tools on the top of the box. You don't need to master all of the techniques and memorize all of the properties and methods right from the start, but you need to know the language well enough that you know what to look for when you are looking things up. Read several times, cover to cover JavaScript : The Definitive Guide by David Flanagan (http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=55OOD40CHD&isbn=0596000480&itm=1) and keep the thing in reach. And I have found that a good understanding of Perl helps one understand JavaScript.

And regular expressions allow you to do a great deal of very complicated form validation in a single line of JavaScript. It is very much worth the time to learn regular expressions.