Great article!

Just a minor correction to your qsa-forEach example:

@
var counters = document.querySelectorAll(‘.counter’);
[].forEach.call(counters, function (elem, index) { elem.textContent = index + 1;
});
@

Most Array prototype methods are generic, so slicing is unnecessary.

Really nice post.
With a background of design and front-end integration (html+css) I am looking to get better at Javascript also.

One site I also find very useful is http://javascriptissexy.com/

http://lifeofjs.com is worth mentioning. Its a collection of good things to learn.

@Nicolas: Agree with the remark about closures: Definitely one of the things you HAVE to understand.

In my case, Stefan Stoyanov’s book “JavaScript Patterns” helped me a lot to really understand the most important JavaScript tweaks and concepts. Highly recommended if you consider yourself to already be quite familiar with the language, but want to get way deeper into the topic.

Great article, gonna share it for sure!

I think the most important thing to understand when you are a coder and you start to develop in javascript is the notion of closure, which is a common feature with Lisp ( see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closure_(computer_science) ). Without understanding this concept, you will not be able to use the power of language, and simple mistakes are going to lose a lot of time.

Currently I use ant scripts to concatenate, minify, compress and deploy my websites and resources. I did not know Grunt that looks perfect for the job, thank you for the info!

Cody Lindley’s books “JavaScript Enlightenment” and “DOM Enlightenment” are also great starting places for people without programming backgrounds.

And in case anyone out there learns best from watching videos, I gave a talk on JS fundamentals at jQuery Portland, and it’s on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkR0RCfI0XM