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Discussion on: 21 Popular JavaScript Libraries Every Web Developer Should Know

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ravavyr profile image
Ravavyr

Every developer should "know OF" them...but you don't actually need to know how to use all of them.

Long lists like these terrify a lot of newbie devs who think they can't build a site if they haven't learned them all. The reality is you don't need any of these to build websites, but they can come in handy. In the case of the frameworks they can even be the core of the project.

Some of the ones on your list are outdated and shouldn't be specifically learned nowadays. Once you have Javascript figured out you can easily pick them up if you MUST deal with them for some sort of project.

Specifically:

  • jQuery - It's not dead, but vanilla JS can do anything jQuery can now, though jQuery has a large library of existing plugins that can be very useful, but newbies shouldn't be learning it as a main thing they do.
  • Modernizr - This library was very useful perhaps 5-10 years ago when internet explorer and safari were freaking terrible to code for. IE is dead, Safari's gotten better. Modernizr is just a large chunk of JS you don't need to add to sites anymore, assuming your CSS is up to par.

Angular/Vue/React are three ways to build full scale sites. Along with their own extensions they are 3 somewhat different framework structures and a dev should perhaps focus on one, rather than try to learn them all. Get decent at one and the other two should be easy to pick up.

The rest of them are things people play with for fun or use when a project specifically requires it, so they're not necessities, but can come in handy.

Web dev is a large ecosystem nowadays and it's often hard to decide what tools to use, but let's help out the newbies by guiding them down a few paths rather than tossing the universe map at them and going "have fun finding your way".

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saoud profile image
Saoud

I would agree, there is no way any dev could really know ALL of the JS libraries.

I would also agree with the 3 major ones you picked. In other special cases I could see some of the more obscure ones being used but if you are familiar with Vanilla JS and a few other libraries you shouldn't have much trouble picking the others up as needed.