Should I learn/become proficient in Javascript?

Question

I am a .NET webdev using ASP.NET, C# etc... I "learned" javascript in college 5+ years ago and can do basic jobs with it. But I wonder if it is useful to become proficient in it.

Why should I learn Javascript? Is it more advantageous then learning JQuery or a different library?

Answer 1

Yes, definitely learn Javascript before you learn one of the libraries about. It's the whole walk-before-you-can-run thing.

Answer 2

Make sure you add these sites to your bookmarks:

Mozilla's developer site: This contains the reference to the Javascript API in Mozilla. This will help you make sure you're writing code that Firefox understands.

IE's site in Microsoft Developer Network: The same, for IE.

W3's reference of DOM for HTML: In most web applications today, the Javascript code manipulates the DOM, which is an internal keeping track of the objects displayed on screen (but you already knew that, right ?) This is the reference to the DOM API. It is language neutral, which means it does not target Javascript, but these methods exist in Javascript too.

Douglas Crockford' site: Doug Crockford is THE MAN when it comes down to Javascript. The articles in his page are a must read. Because Javascript has closures and first-class functions, he believes it is closer to Lisp and Scheme than to other languages. And he teaches you how to greatly improve your code with these language features.

Yahoo Developer network: You may also want to check this. I'm not a regular visitor to this site, though, so I can't really say much about it.