YUI Theater

September 22, 2007, 11:59 AM | 0 Comments

Anyone who works with advanced JavaScript on a regular basis will tell you that it’s one of the most misunderstood and under documented languages there is. Fortunately though, the resources are getting better and I just thought I’d draw attention to one of the better ones I’ve enjoyed over the past little while.

Yahoo!’s YUI library has been increasing in popularity over the past year or so, and for good reason—Yahoo! has done a lot of great work with YUI. One of the great things about YUI is that it’s probably one of the most thoroughly documented JavaScript libraries around. Personally I think that one of the things that makes a language like PHP so popular is the great documentation that the PHP developers have released alongside it. Unfortunately, I can’t say the same thing for some of the JavaScript libraries out there… which in turn make some of them a bit of a chore to work with.

Anyways, the point of this post is not to brag on YUI and how great it is, but more to draw attention to another great resource that Yahoo! has made freely available to everyone and it’s called YUI Theater. YUI Theater contains videos of a lot of great presentations by some of the world’s most renowned JavaScript experts like Douglas Crockford (widely recognized as the world’s leading expert on JavaScript and the guy who popularized JSON), John Resig (creator of jQuery) and Joe Hewitt (creator of Firebug) just to name a few.

The name is a little confusing because it might cause some developers to think that it’s all about the YUI library, but it really isn’t. Sure, there are some specific presentations about YUI, but most of the talks deal with some great JavaScript theory that I think every JavaScript developer should take a look at—it’ll be well worth the time you invest. The videos themselves are available via stream at Yahoo! Video or if you wanted to throw them on your iPod and watch them at your leisure, you can download the m4v files.

If I had to pick from all of the videos and recommend some, I’d suggest watching all of the presentations by Douglas Crockford:

• The JavaScript Programming Language (Parts 1-4)
• An Inconvenient API: The Theory of the DOM (Parts 1-3)
  
• Advanced JavaScript (Parts 1-3)
• JavaScript: The Good Stuff
• Quality

All of the videos listed above come in at just under 6 hours combined, but trust me, it’s worth the time.

Posted in: JavaScript, Web Development