Guys I just finished learning javascript and would like to progress to jquery.
But I just saw this** article. It explains that I should rather learn a javascript framework like react or VUE instead of jquery.
Please am confused right now, which one should I learn?
ju gwalior
There are always articles saying “X is dead, don’t learn it!” or “Y is the future, ignore everything else!” Articles like that get a lot of clicks and generate buzz.
That being said…
I’m not a big fan of jQ. I think there are better options. I think it isn’t used on too many new projects and is largely kept alive by its use by WordPress. I think it will slowly fade - it was valuable when it came out but I think that now most of the problems solved by jQ are now solved in vanilla JS. This is just my opinion.
That being said…
I still think it is good to learn the basics of jQ. It is a library that is still in a lot of legacy code. I think libraries like React or Angular are much better modern solutions for manipulating the DOM and create better job prospects. I’m not a big fan of Vue - it has a cult following and is probably very good, but I’m not seeing as many jobs asking for it. (But some jobs for the other two might think knowing Vue is good enough to get you started.)
So, to sum up, imho, learn the basics of jQ and then move onto something more “modern”. Don’t deep dive into jQ unless you know you are shooting for a job that requires it or want to be a WP developer.
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It’s one of those “good to know” things. It isn’t dead, there are still a huge number of sites that use it. Some are legacy, and some are new-ish, by devs who felt it right.
But you may well still encounter jQ. So be aware of it, be aware of how to use it or how to research it, how to migrate code away from it…
The intent of jQ, according to the founders, was to become obsolete after the browser wars, and that’s largely how it played out.
If you are asking if your time is better spent learning React or Vue instead of jQuery then my answer would be yes. But that doesn’t mean you can’t familiarize yourself a bit with jQuery as well.
jQuery has pretty good docs and you can quickly find the information you might need when reading or working with jQuery code. I wouldn’t learn it for use instead of plain JS or a framework but knowing about it is also just part of having a broader web development knowledge.
In my opinion, focus your time and energy learning a framework like React or Vue as you mentioned.
You could end up in a job which involves working on a legacy code base utilising JQuery, it’s still fairly common. But it’s well documented and easy to learn on the fly. Not knowing it is not going to hold you back. Not knowing a modern Javascript front end framework will hold you back.
It’s not very important nowadays (vs. 5-10 years ago). This is with caveat that like @kevinSmith says this is my opinion.
But if you need a small amount of interactivity for a website, just using the basic browser APIs is fine: jQuery was something that smoothed over that when it was not fine. If you need something that acts like an app (very common requirement nowadays), then you want one of the frontend frameworks (React, Angular, Vue, etc).
However I would strongly suggest reading and understanding the code in jQuery (it’s available in annotated versions, which are all older versions but that’s fine).
One of the reasons jQuery isn’t used a lot now is because it isn’t granular. You need to to do some work to just get a bit or iQuery, it’s normally just the whole thing, and that one thing may the the only thing you want. And other libraries fulfio that need without needing all the bits you don’t want.
However, it’s a good example of JavaScript’s prototypes & fluent interfaces built using them
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