In some ways this is a list of links to review again as I learn what I’m doing.

First is a StackExchange post about what everyone should know about Javascript.

That led me to the JavaScript Garden which has more information about quirks and best practices in JavaScript.

It also led me to this quiz that kangax wrote, showing with some simplicity some of the oddities of scope, syntax and so forth of JavaScript. I initially only got 4 right, although I’d probably have gotten a few more if I’d read and thought more carefully.  I went though the questions one by one, until I understood them, which is what this sort of quiz is for.

It took about an hour, a good part of which was reading kangax’s description of how delete works, and how the different scopes for global, function and eval work.  And I’m getting a clearer understanding of what happens in function declaration vs function expressions.  It’s also pretty clear that best practices have changed over the past few years as the products have matured and people’s understanding changes.

I’m thinking about the Meeting Room signs I wrote here for work, and how I wouldn’t release that code today.  They are working well and staying running, but the code is bad, potentially unsafe (not really as there are only 2-3 people who can enter text on the monitors) and I’d rather be proud of it.  Rewriting that for the new CakePHP platform here at work would be a good project while I wait on other things here.