Knowing JavaScript

At my company, we’ve been interviewing people for a web developer position, with particular emphasis on programming. Something I’ve noticed is a lot of developers say: “I know JavaScript.” So a simple question I devised for testing this was, “how would you debug JavaScript?” You’d be surprised how many people don’t know the answer to this.

So, if you’re a php/perl/python/ruby/asp/etc programmer who “knows” JavaScript, here’s a few tools to help with debugging. These are Firefox extensions.

• View Rendered Source Chart – I can’t live without this, it allows you to view the html that gets generated by your JavaScript
• Hypertext DOM Browser
• Venkman – Usually used when all else fails
• FireBug – This one is new, I haven’t used it much yet