More often than not, the only thing W3Schools gives "really good examples" of is how you should NEVER write code.
I can sympathize a bit with those who say that MDC has somewhat of a barrier-to-entry, but at the same time, learning stuff the WRONG way first is just as bad if not worse than not learning it at all. It's hard to break bad habits once they're in-grained, and w3schools tends to in-grain a lot of them in such a way that "students" have no idea that the code is horrible and that there is much more to JavaScript, and better ways to get the task done, than how it is presented on W3Schools.
I'll fully admit that JavaScript isn't the most straightforward language to learn - it's further hampered by the fact that it really is so easy to just jump right into it without knowing where to start, and then end up starting on the wrong foot. Perhaps the comments about MDC being hard to "get started" with are onto something, and perhaps we should strive to fix that as well (MDC is a wiki after all). But on the other end of the spectrum, we also need to make it harder to learn stuff that's horribly ill-advised or just plain wrong.
More often than not, the only thing W3Schools gives "really good examples" of is how you should NEVER write code.
I can sympathize a bit with those who say that MDC has somewhat of a barrier-to-entry, but at the same time, learning stuff the WRONG way first is just as bad if not worse than not learning it at all. It's hard to break bad habits once they're in-grained, and w3schools tends to in-grain a lot of them in such a way that "students" have no idea that the code is horrible and that there is much more to JavaScript, and better ways to get the task done, than how it is presented on W3Schools.
I'll fully admit that JavaScript isn't the most straightforward language to learn - it's further hampered by the fact that it really is so easy to just jump right into it without knowing where to start, and then end up starting on the wrong foot. Perhaps the comments about MDC being hard to "get started" with are onto something, and perhaps we should strive to fix that as well (MDC is a wiki after all). But on the other end of the spectrum, we also need to make it harder to learn stuff that's horribly ill-advised or just plain wrong.