Improving your jQuery skills is a must for every talented front-end web developer. There are several ways to accomplish this task, but the key thing to understand here is that it takes some time before getting effective results. You should be patient and keep working.
Projects
When I was studying classical guitar, I learned an important thing that I later did apply to web development: there are some musical pieces that can improve your skills better than others. These pieces require much more efforts, both technically and theoretically, but when you finally manage to play them with ease, your skills are already improved.
Coming to the web development scenario, there are projects that are really useful for improving your jQuery skills. For example, when a project requires the knowledge of a jQuery topic that you've never covered before, this can actually be a good opportunity to become a better jQuery developer.
Generally, in these cases you'll first hit Google to search for an answer to something that you don't know. Answers may be very different from each other and you should always start from the most significant ones. Then you can try to adapt these solutions to your specific project but without copying them blindly. You should be aware of the fact that the code found on Google is never perfect as is.
When you rewrite and study these snippets, try to extend your knowledge a little bit by consulting the official jQuery documentation. The jQuery documentation rarely offers quick solutions. Instead, it's useful to clear your mind about some key aspects of the library itself. If you don't know the basics, you can't proceed.
Try to challenge yourself with difficult projects. Trivial projects are just routine: they rarely make you a better jQuery developer.
Testing
As a contributor of the W3C CSS Test Suite, I've learned several things about testing.
First, a test should be atomic. Complicated tests are less useful than atomic tests because the features involved are too many and having a clear overview of the process involved becomes very difficult.
Second, a test should cover a specific aspect of the jQuery library. If you have doubts about a particular topic, then you can create an atomic test to make things clearer.
Third, a test should make a preliminary assertion on the expected result. You should always know in advance how a browser is expected to execute your code.
Tests can be both automatic or manual. For automated testing you can use a specific tool like qUnit but for manual testing you have no choice: first document yourself and then write your test.
Plugins
Writing a jQuery plugin is a must. People tend to think that if they've found a solution to a specific problem, this solution should be kept private. Far from it.
It doesn't matter what impact your solution will have on the global web development trends. Sharing your code is the best way to make it better because you'll receive feedback from other developers and this will actually improve your coding skills.
CSS, HTML, JavaScript
If your knowledge of CSS, HTML and JavaScript has some flaws, it's time to document yourself and study these web standards deeper.
You should always be up-to-date with the latest best practices and coding standards. Probably you don't realize their importance but:
- jQuery is written in JavaScript.
- CSS affects all the jQuery effects, widgets and plugins.
- The HTML5 APIs have radically changed the way to address some popular jQuery problems, such as drag'n drop, file uploads, client-side storage and much more.
In other words, studying web standards is just another way to accomplish the same thing: becoming a better jQuery developer.
