I just came across this article in Ajaxaian where Dion Almaer rant what you need to do when you code JS for living!!! Some says that pure JS is nothing, some says that just JS cant take you anywhere. I agree partially with Dion’s thought and wants to add something by myself.

Well, you can do pure JS for living as I am doing right now. Beside lots other tasks in pageflakes, I write huge amount of JS everyweek to develop flakes as a development engineer. Beside that I also maintain the community, study JS in the user submitted flakes and support them to write efficient JS. If you neglect JS as a language, you are doing a big mistake. JS is extremely powerful and you can do things beyond your imagination with it.

I want to add some tips beside dion’s suggestions. You also need to do the following if you really want to live by coding JS.

1. DOM Scripting is a Must, but not all, simple Node operations will do.
2. Interacting with CSS is also a must.
3. Manipulating JSON is more important than XML becoz its much more flexible and lightweight to transfer your data as JSON object.
4. Choose some popular libraries and stick to them. Personally I suggest Prototype (Its a must), jQuery, mooTools and Scriptaculous. I dont like Dojo becoz it seems too heavier to me. (I dont agree with Dino in this issue, I suggest DRY, Dont Repeat Yourself. Why do you have to reinvent the wheel?)
5. AJAX is also a must.
6. Being able to write JS in Object Notation format (he he he, its JSON)
7. keep yourself uptodate by visiting sites which inform you what’s actually going on in this sector.
8. Be aware of browser compatibility issues (Its a must)

And Finally

9. Love JS