Of course seeing the examples of JQuery and Lodash raises the question, how do I know which libraries
exist,
is there a page where all libraries are listed?
That's not really the case.
There is a page, npmjs.com which is basically a repository of Javascript packages
but it's not really a page where you would just go and browse around,
that's not the core idea,
this is more like a lookup resource if you already know a certain library, like Lodash and you then
want to get more information about it
and it's especially useful if you want include it in a more complex Javascript project which you're managing
differently, something we'll cover in the tooling section
but what we're not doing right now.
So this is not really a page where you would go and actively search for new interesting Javascript
libraries,
instead it typically works such that you have a certain problem which you want to solve and you just
google for the problem,
for example Javascript sendHttpRequest.
We want to send a Javascript HttpRequest and we don't know how that works or we know that it works
with XMLHttpRequest which is also what we find here but we're not too sure how that worked.
Well typically if you then browse around and for example you go to Stack Overflow which is a great forum
for discussing programming questions, we might get some ideas on how we can send a request and at some
point of time, somewhere you'll find some alternatives to the native APIs,
for example here JQuery is mentioned. Now turns out JQuery is not just there to help you work with
the DOM,
indeed it also makes sending HttpRequests a bit easier
but if you search around a bit more and maybe you read this blog post and programming is a lot about
reading and searching, you will learn about another library and that would be Axios
and that indeed is a really popular library for sending HttpRequests. So your next step then should be
to search for something like axios.js
and here you find the Axios Github page. Github is a page, a platform where open source projects can be
managed, so where other people can share their projects and their code and you can actually collaborate
there and work together on a project,
a really great page. Now most popular libraries or basically all libraries also do have a Github repository
so you can even look into the code of these projects
if you wanted to.
More importantly than that, at least if you are getting started, you can also find further resources there
on the starting page.
Here for example, you learned how you can install Axios, how you use it and a rough overview of what it
is
and here for example, you find a CDN link that would allow you to include Axios and then you could
use it to send HttpRequests
and this is how you discover new libraries and how you can learn more about them.
There isn't a single page but it really is like a lot in programming,
a lot about googling, reading and Github, Github is really a great resource to learn more about projects
and especially to learn more about Javascript libraries.