The peer to peer university was recently created after lots of discussion around it on the Google groups forums and now is really showing great promise.

I’ve joined 2 groups – the JavaScript 101 and the Ruby on Rails course.

This post is just to focus on the javascript course. I’ve done a good years worth of working with javascript now and possibly 2 and a half years of jQuery. This doesn’t however mean that I’ve grokked every part of it, but I do want to and have been reading tons of books (the Rhino book, jQuery fundaments, secrets of a JavaScript ninja, bulletproof ajax and lots more that I’ll link here through my delicious bookmarks).

The thought of being in a more university environment with lots of people learning really excites me. To get into the course you have to watch a talk by Douglas Crockford who talks about the history of JavaScript (around the time of the Microsoft and Netscape battle) and then talks about the fundamentals.

One of the things I didn’t realise was that JavaScript uses numbers that are 64bit or doubles – known as double precision from the days of Fortran. Which is useful to know that when doing division.

We are then asked to write a simple Javascript program which will print the sum of 2+2 and display the result in an alert window in the browser.

Here is how I tackled the question:


// done quickly just to run the program!
function sumOf(a,b){
c = a + b;
alert(c);
}

sumOf(2,2);


All this work is and will be available on GitHub and the above project can be tested here.