fauxsoup - 4:34 pm on Oct 25, 2010 (gmt 0)

For the record, I would recommend AGAINST casting a case from magnesium, given its high reactivity to water. It's already bad enough when you spill a drink on your laptop.

Regarding 56k connections, you have to remember that some bandwidth is reserved for uploading those requests your making. Additionally, someone had mentioned that something like 65% of the US is on the internet and 61% is on broadband, which is all well and good except that they said that meant 56k had 4% of the US. However, is the second number, 61%, a subset of the first (as in, 61% of the 65% with internet) or a measurement of US citizens with broadband? It's pertinent, because one suggests 4% dialup and the other suggests 39% dialup, the latter of which I tend to believe is the more accurate number.

On the subject of frameworks, they're great for getting something done quickly, but for production it's just overhead. jQuery is just a collection of functions which use standard JS to accomplish some goals. Not only is there bandwidth overhead, but also processing overhead, and it doesn't always play well. For instance, jQuery adds several functions to arrays. If you have standard JS on the page which loops through an array, you'll also be looping through those functions (which creates all sorts of fun problems if you ever assume you can operate on the data in your array without validating it, typically causing 3 hours of frustration and ultimately a single line of code, which looks a lot like if(typeof(array[key]) == "function") continue;)

Additionally, the selector function for jQuery is rather inefficient, as it parses the whole DOM tree looking for selected elements. It might be a bit more efficient for IDs and classes with specified tags, but $("#something") is just a shorter version of document.getElementById("something"), and $("div.class") equates to a 6 line function, of which any experienced JSer has twelve versions.

The really inefficient thing about JQuery in this case is that most people who program with it use the $ selector to refer to an element or group of elements they already accessed. This isn't so bad for IDs, but for classes you wind up spending more time scanning for elements than processing them.

If you want to MASTER javascript, then do as JAB creations suggests and get very familiar with things like the DOM tree and anonymous functions (first-class functions are easily the greatest feature of JS). Later on you can play with JQuery and other frameworks, after you realize that you can use variables to store references to nodes and node arrays and can understand things like descendant selectors and scope in javascript (which is a mess when you first think about it, but a very organized mess after further thought).