Three useful sites for javascript programmers

In my quest for learning new and awesome javascript techniques I discovered three particular sites that helped me a lot. And here they are, in no particular order.

JSFiddle

JSFiddle is a pretty cool website, it let's you use javascript and doesn't afraid anything. Free to use, it's perfect for people who want to test all the features of various javascript frameworks. It has support for MooTools, jQuery, Prototype, YUI, Glow, Dojo, Processing.js, EXTjs, Raphael, RightJS, Three.js, Zepto, Enyo, Shipyard, MooFX, Knockout.js, The X Toolkit and, of course, plain ol' pure (vanilla) javascript. I don't know about you, but that's more frameworks than I even heard of.

And it's great!

Even more, you can register an account to have a place for you javascript snippets and show someone how a certain function works or pass along a working script, not just a piece of code.

jsPerf

I found about jsPerf from a colleague of mine and boy, I was impressed. Since I'm a beginner when it comes to JavaScript, at least at the time I'm writing this, I put a very high emphasis on good practices and performance. Since I'm learning it from scratch, I'd rather learn it the right way.

In terms of performance testing, jsPerf is truly a gift for the programmers. Not only you can set up your own tests (like the one I made some time ago, to see if accessing the document via a cached variable is faster than doing it directly), but you get access to tests made by others. It's a good idea to check that page from time to time to see what various improvements people tested and remember the best solution, so you can also use it in the future.

And last but certainly not least...

JSLint

This is the site I think it's the most useful for javascript beginners. It works in a very simple way: you paste your javascript code there and the site tells you how good it is in terms of formatting and javascript best-practices.

Thanks to that site I found out about the "use strict" statement and other various helpful things that are more important than you might consider. It's a very big deal to have clean, structured and organized code. Even if you'll be the only one to maintain it, it will make your job easier in the future.