My brother kept saying skip jQuery and just learn plain JavaScript, and he was right
About 8 months ago my brother, who does web stuff for a living, told me to stop copying jQuery tutorials and just learn plain JavaScript first. I ignored him for a bit because jQuery felt easy and I could make things work, but I kept getting stuck when I tried to read other people's code. I finally switched to a free plain JS course back in March, and honestly the first two weeks were rough, but now stuff like querySelector and addEventListener actually makes sense to me. My old jQuery projects still run fine, so your mileage may vary depending on what you're building. Did anyone else get told to skip a library early on, and did it help or just slow you down?
You mentioned the first two weeks were rough, so what actually clicked for you after that? Like was it a certain project or did you finally hit a point where you stopped reaching for $ out of habit? I ask because the hard part for me wasnt the syntax, it was unlearning stuff like chaining everything and letting jQuery hide what was really happening in the DOM. Once I had to write my own loop with forEach to grab a bunch of elements, I finally got why people said learn the basics first. So was there one specific moment or exercise where plain JS stopped feeling like a chore?