jQuery is a great JavaScript library for getting things done quickly without having to put too much thought into how you're going to be doing it. Getting DOM elements is a streamlined process, and chaining functions together makes for a non-stop coding session that can last minutes. But that doesn't come without some cost to performance. Remember, jQuery is based on JavaScript, which means that JavaScript will always be faster in every respect of the way.

A student recently asked me what the best way to check for an empty string in JavaScript was. I answered in the best way that I knew how and gave various methods that check for empty strings, such as checking for the value and checking the length of the variable. This left me wondering for some time after our conversation how accurate I was with my answer. And while usually code is left to subjectivity many a time, there must be one method that leans more towards the best practice or at least to improved performance.

And you never thought that algorithm class from college was going to pay off. In this post I'll be going over how to add the ability to sort to any table in JavaScript. All you will need to do is to add the sorting class to the specified table that you wish to add sorting to and then watch the magic happen.

This post won't make much sense unless you have a touchscreen!

Touch events have been around for some time now, and I feel they are not being used enough on mobile versions of sites. From swiping to scrolling to manipulating DOM elements, they are incredibly easy to implement and can definitely take us away from the traditional route of just vertical scrolling and button clicks that we default to today.

Welcome to part 2 in this building Tetris tutorial. If you missed part 1, feel free to check it out here. In this second part, we'll be finishing up the project by adding collision detection to each Tetris shape, generating new blocks, rotations and detecting when rows have been filled and collapsed.

Tetris is one of the first games that many of us played as a youth. It's fun and challenging and a level can take you from anywhere to a minute to forever if you so play your cards right. So in honor of the game, in this blog post, we'll go over how to build a Tetris clone in JavaScript without using any 3rd party libraries. Just plain old vanilla JavaScript and CSS.

There is no better way to share a location than with a map and a marker on it. The universal indicator of map based location in this and age. So today let's go over how to generate a map on your website using the Google Map JavaScript API, and how to add markers wherever you wish to mark your place.

Today I will be building a small BlackJack game in pure JavaScript in the hopes that you out there reading this can use it as a frame to build something much bigger. And if you're a beginner in the programming world, than perhaps this tutorial will help you get a much better idea of how function, objects and DOM manipulation works in JS.

In this post I will cover how to create a rain effect using the JavaScript game engine, Crafty.js, for a 2D side-scroller type of game. If you're new to Crafty, then feel free to check out my previous posts in which I cover the framework from a beginner's perspective.

On this rainy day in Los Angeles, stay home, drink too much coffee and enjoy a classic game from our teen years (maybe). I coded this snake game clone some time ago, and still find myself coming back to it from time to time. It isn't finalized just yet, but it is for sure challenging and it is playable.