Week 5 was mostly jQuery. We started on day 13 with the basics of jQuery like how to link to it through a CDN, selected elements with the $(‘element’) syntax, and did other in-class exercises.

On day 14 we did some more advanced stuff like using the jQuery .animate() method. We also looked at scope and how it affects what the this keyword refers to.

We ended the week on Day 15 with the longest in-class coding exercise we’ve done so far. We spent 1 hour and 45 minutes making a jQuery Calculator. It was supposed to be a group project, but by the end of it we had all checked out.

Things I’m Still Processing

The timed coding exercises for the most part are super fun. They are definitely getting more challenging. But the last couple of in-class exercises, particularly the “group” coding ones, I was no where near to completing them.

Which brings me to working with groups. This is something that I’ve been looking forward to. One of the top reasons that I decided to enroll in the Bootcamp. To work with others, learn, and help each other. But my enthusiasm about this has started to drop a notch. This could be a “it’s not you, it’s me” situation. Maybe it’s just a matter of practice. But so far, the group I was assigned to… well we suck.

var and jQuery

I don’t want to get into the habit of using var to declare variables having some knowledge about let and const. Some students have asked me about it since all the class exercises and the instructor always uses var. My answer was that “var has issues with scope” and leave it at that because I don’t want to confuse them.

jQuery is cute. I like using it. It is a nice JS library to learn as your first library. For DOM manipulation, most of the code you write is for the most part, shorter. But I’m comfortable with just vanilla JS for DOM manipulation. Check out You Might Not Need jQuery and see that while the syntax is sometimes shorter, since ES6, it isn’t that much of a hassle to say, toggle a class with plain JS now a days. See also this video by Brad Traversy. This video was published in 2018.

All I’m saying is that like Bootstrap, do learn jQuery enough to understand it and be able to go through the docs, but like Brad says in the video, don’t spend too much time trying to master it to the point that you’ll have to depend on it.