Mix10 Session - 6 Things Every jQuery Developer Must Know

This year I was chosen by the community to speak at Mix10 as one of the Open Call sessions. I was honored to be selected and thoroughly enjoyed attending Mix10 and building relationships.

My session was entitled 6 Things Every jQuery Developer Should Know

This seminar provides an overview of several in-depth concepts that developers need to learn to bring their jQuery development to the next level. We review six things that you should know, such as: "What Is This?", "Am I Referencing the jQuery Object or a DOM Element?", "Understanding Selectors", "Combine and Minify Your Scripts", "Different Ways of Storing Data", and "The Dos and Don'ts of Events". Along the way, we share several helpful websites and tools to make your job as a jQuery developer easier.

For each of the 6 points I started with beginning material and then progressed to intermediate then advanced concepts. When I moved to the next point the content would go back to beginner and then progress to advanced. In this way, I hoped to reach a wider audience with things tips they could take away from the session. 

The video from my talk is now available from the Mix10 website. You can watch the video and also download my web-based presentation along with the code I showed.

• Video (hosted on Mix10)
• Web-based Presentation
  • Includes Slides with embedded mini-demos
  • Best viewed in Firefox
    • I'll try to resolve the cross-browser issues
    • If you are interested in helping resolve these issues, I’d appreciate it
    • Chrome is close to working, but IE is not ;)
• Demos
  • Picasa Web Demo
  • Twitter Flip Demo
  • Twitter Timeline Demo
• Download all the above slides & demos (not the video)

Unfortunately, the main demo that I wanted to show didn’t work during the presentation. The demo worked the night before & it works now. My guess is that the Picasa Web API was temporarily down during my talk, which is unfortunate. I guess I should have expected something to go wrong. Anyway, overall I think it went well. I had several questions at the end and people stayed after to ask questions as well.

During the presentation I listed several resources that I recommended. I pulled those out and provided them below for quick access them. Some of them I demonstrated during the talk and others I just referred to as good resources you may want to check out.

3h. Knowing Selectors

• Useful Selector Playgrounds and Tools
  • Firebug Add-on & FireQuery Plug-in
  • jQueryify Bookmarklet by @kswedberg
  • jQuery Selector Playground by @kswedberg & @codylindley
  • Selector Gadget Bookmarklet
  • See how I used Firebug to learn jQuery by @encosia

6. Combine & Minify Scripts

• Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.0
  • Command Line, MsBuild Task, .NET Assembly
• YUI Compressor & Yahoo! UI Library: YUI Compressor for .NET by @karlseguin
• Google Closure Compiler
• Firebug Tools
  • Yahoo's YSlow Firebug Add-on
  • Google's Page Speed Firebug Add-on

If you were able to attend my session at Mix10 or watch the above video recording, I would appreciate if you could take a moment to rate my talk on speakerrate.com. Thank you again for voting my session into Mix10.

Note: Someone asked me what Visual Studio theme I was using to show the code near the end of the session. As it turns out, I was using JetBrains WebStorm IDE. Jeffrey Way did a great mini-screencast review of the new IDE on Nettuts.