Please don't give out advice like this. I'm really fed up with having to deprogramme people who've written too much jQuery and don't actually know JavaScript, o

Please don't give out advice like this. I'm really fed up with having to deprogramme people who've written too much jQuery and don't actually know JavaScript, or worse, barely realise that there is such a language. I appreciate that your suggestion is to learn jQuery and then go through a language reference, not to stop once you've done the jQuery bit, but trust me, that's just what most people will do. jQuery is a very opinionated library, which is fine in and of itself, but that makes it a terrible introduction to JavaScript, precisely because it "hides most of the ugliness of the language", as you put it. To understand why this is a problem, consider the following points. 1) jQuery is not the only DOM library out there. Prototype, MooTools, Dojo and YUI are just some of them. To be a good front-end developer one should know at least a couple, and be able to learn any of them. The easiest way to learn them is to know the language and just learn a library, rather than learning a bunch of different DSLs with perhaps a few unifying themes. 2) JavaScript is now used on the server as well, and to write server-side JavaScript one really does need to know the language. 3) If one ever wants to write anything beyond hacky little scripts—a real web application, for example—then one cannot get away with just knowing jQuery. Large applications must be structured. The rats' nest of callbacks that many jQuery programmers seem to think is sufficient and even appropriate application design will not scale to large codebases. The key skill here is knowing what sort of structure needs to be introduced and being able to use both use libraries which provide the necessary abstraction and write one's own where necessary.