Next Tuesday, March 24^th I'll give a JavaScript talk at the Rockford .NET user group.

This talk will be basically the same one I gave for the LCNUG back in December.

The few opportunities I had to give this talk were highly rewarding. It's priceless to see developers realizing how mistakenly they had been using JavaScript, and finally being able to understand why "that bug" was happening in their pages.

So, if you live in the area and think there must be something about JavaScript that you're just not getting, please try to stop by and ask your questions.

JavaScript - Beyond the Curly Braces

One of the greatest problems with JavaScript is its superficial syntax resemblance of C-style languages. We call it the curse of the curly braces.

That is also a very large source of frustration for developers trying to learn JavaScript beyond the basics. Thinking that JavaScript is somehow related to Java or even "It's almost like C# but a little simpler" is an unfortunate and common occurrence that can only lead to trouble.

In this session we will analyze some of the fundamental differences between JavaScript and C#/Java. We will highlight the pitfalls that can trap us and the appropriate workarounds for them.

Time permitting and if there's interest we will take a look at Idiomatic JavaScript, which will help us understand how JavaScript is being written these days. Learning about this will also help you when trying to read the source code or even the documentation and samples for popular JavaScript libraries like jQuery, Prototype, YUI, etc.