Javascript Boot Camp Tutorial

On Monday I gave a 3-hour tutorial first thing in the morning, here at O’Reilly OSCON 2006 in Portland. From the description:

Even though AJAX wouldn’t ever have become so popular if the Javascript world hadn’t suddenly exploded with mature development and testing tools, there’s little information on how to be a really good Javascript programmer.

This talk is for everyone who feels their Javascript skills just aren’t up to snuff.

You can now download the goodies associated.

Shameless plug: I’m working on a book called Web Scripting Power Tools with Chris Cornutt, to be published by O’Reilly this fall. I’m apparently so bad at self-promotion that I forgot to mention it in my talk. Yow. But do watch for it! It’s going to cover all that I talked about and much, much, much more. Interested in being on a notification list for this book? Drop me an email ( amy aht infocookie dawt com ).

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Downloads

As promised, the entire slide stack is downloadable; and the source code I used to write the Javascript Boot Camp portions of the presentation, as well (not the Prototype code).

Like this presentation? Like me? Would you Digg this story to help get the word out? Thanks! 🙂

Links

Specific libraries/developer tools I mentioned in my talk:

Libraries/tools others brought up during the talk (thanks, guys!):

Web sites etc:

Delicious lists:

Errata

First, I’d like to say that it was an amazing experience for me, because it really was.

This was my first-ever 3-hour tutorial, and my first trip to OSCON. To say I was “intimidated’ would be an understatement, but luckily I was a bit zonked out on cold medicine so I didn’t have a chance to really be too scared. Also, the crowd was just a great group of people… everyone was patient with my coughing and water breaks (sorry I coughed into the mic, guys!), and they asked great questions.

Special thanks to the gentleman who helped with the audio and reminded me to cough away from the mic, and to the other gentleman who brought me apple juice and water for my throat. Also, a super big round of thanks to the conference folks who fixed the power and whatnot. You guys rock! I literally could not have made it through without you.

28 Comments

  1. mike says:

    wtf is this?

  2. Amy Hoy says:

    Uh, a 3-hour Javascript tutorial that I gave at O’Reilly OSCON 2006, perhaps?

  3. Peter lin says:

    I just download the pdf and God! I love it. Can I ask you what font you use in the head above the content. It’s very cute.

    Best regards.

  4. Carson McComas says:

    Amy – wow, what a truly delicious slide show. Something, in fact, that I would love to print out… but with all that black background, it’d take a small fortune in toner just to make it through! I don’t suppose kind words and begging could pursuade you to offer a printable version with a white background…? (perty please, with sugar on top?)

  5. Clint says:

    Amy! This is fantastic. I love you.

    No, really…I love you.

  6. Steve Weintraut says:

    The slide presentation was fabulous. Great Job!

  7. Zane says:

    I was at oscon and was present at your tutorial. I also provided you with positive feed back on the oreilly web site. I enjoyed it very much, and will likely use it every day as I start working with javascript next week.

    So thank you! And don’t worry about the coughing, it wasn’t that bad. Guido van Rossum, the creator of Python, did a 40 minute session and he coughed more than you did, and he was less fun to listen to.

  8. Leo says:

    Great slideshow – I need this believe me! Any chance of an audio / video cast of your tutorial?

    cheers, Leo

  9. This is some poker spam says:

    I got a cold right after attending this talk. I’m pretty sure your coughing into the microphone amplified the germs and projected them into the audience. Thanks a lot! Jerk!

  10. Ben Lenarts says:

    This is just what I needed, a wonnderfully compact introduction to JS.

    Thank you so much!

  11. Ben says:

    Your slideshow was insanely helpful! Thanks so much for producing it! It must have taken forever to create, what with the coloured syntax … and the 108 slides XD.

    Regardless, thanks so much!

  12. Paul Duncan says:

    Hi, There seems to be a javascript issue with this page making it completely unusable in IE. FF reports prototype is having issues with onMouseOut.

  13. max says:

    Where are the slides from "When Interface Design Attacks!" ?

    Good show, I enjoyed the session.

  14. Slide 40 is incorrect. It mentions JSON but it’s usage is of the object literal. JSON is much stricter: JSON.org.

  15. Zendar says:

    Hm, whenever I move mouse appears cute little popup that says: A runtime error has occured. Do you wish to debug?

    Not so much of a recomendation for javascript tutorial. (or maybe it is IE6 bug?)

  16. Jason says:

    Holy Smokes! That was really great! Better than any book I’ve read on the subject.

    I feel like I just found $50 in my back pocket!

  17. stritti says:

    Really great slides!

    Working with JavaScript, you are probably also interessted in Log4js the logging API for JavaScript: http://log4js.berlios.de

  18. Ludovic's waiting for your book says:

    Thanks a lot ! really really helpful. Great Job !

  19. Amy Hoy says:

    Hey everybody, working on responding to you all:

    First, thanks to everyone who said nice things here or by email, and also to those folks who pointed out a few minor mistakes in the presentation (I’ve never claimed to be perfect, thank god!) I’ll address those ASAP. I just can’t describe how busy I’ve been. If only I could do this blog full-time… 🙂

    About the JS errors on this page… I don’t get them in FireFox, and for this site, frankly I don’t test in IE (well over 80% of my visitors are in FF/Saf). IMO, I have to do enough of that at my job 😉 I’ve got FireFox 1.5 and FireBug, so I’d probably catch ’em. Are you folks in FF getting errors using FF 1.5? Is it possible that it only happened during high load on the server and the JS files weren’t fully loaded on your computer yet?

    The heading font is Carnation, which is a free font (I think I got it from dafont.com).

    And about printing it out… did you try looking at the Javascript source file also linked, and would that satisfy you? Because changing the whole presentation to a light color would be a bitch — I got the syntax colored text by taking screenshots of my text editor with the text blown up real big, and so that’d take a long time to re-do.

    Don’t forget that if you’re interested in more, drop me an email so I can notify you when my O’Reilly Javascript book comes out (written with Chris Cornutt!): amy aht infocookie dawt com. (No, I’m not from insert-geographical-area-here; I just don’t want any more spam…)

  20. Brian Ritchie says:

    Hey, I was raised in insert-geographical-area-here. Some good people live there. Don’t knock it!

    Amy, you have a great writing style. I’m not sure exactly what it is about your writing that accomplishes this, but it is very easy to stay interested while reading, and things are presented very clearly. I don’t see you trying to flaunt your knowledge while compromising clarity, which is what I see with many technology authors. I’m glad to see that you can convert your writing style flawlessly to a presentation style. It has me thinking…I would love to see your presentation style used to produce an animated or video instructional someday. Anyone for an Amy Hoy screencasts? It wouldn’t have to be "live" like that Rails 10-minute-blog style of screencast. I’m talking about something fully planned and edited, with graphics (and kittens).

  21. Sam says:

    Hi – The links don’t seem to work for the Sourcecode and Slides…?

  22. Ruprict says:

    Same deal as Sam….links no worky for me…..

  23. PasT says:

    PLEASE FIX!!

    Javascript Boot Camp Tutorial links doesn’t work anymore…

    PLEASE FIX!!

  24. Emm says:

    The links to the slides are broken (http://static.slash7.com/presentations/oscon2006/javascriptbootcamp.pdf)

    Is there a mirror somewhere ? (or could someone post the files somewhere ?)

  25. Chris Campbell says:

    Hi Amy

    I’m interested in the boot camp files too, please fix!

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