Hi Steve,
If I was going to teach someone today who is brand new to front end development then I’d start with JavaScript fundamentals (and of course HTML and CSS fundamentals 🙂), or I’d point them to resources that do, such as the excellent: You Don’t Know JS book series. I think for newbies learning jQuery it’s only going to hold them back, stunting their learning/progression as they’re much better off learning the underlying language rather than a library that sits on top of it, same thing goes for any language. It’s no different, in my opinion, jumping straight into React, or Angular, without spending time learning the JS language, especially React (can’t speak much for Angular) when so much of it is writing native JS anyway. I know I’m better at React for knowing JS better.
jQuery did a lot of good and helped the community greatly. I just don’t think it’s that necessary anymore in today’s front end development landscape as writing native JS does the job just as good. However, if devs are still using it in their day to day work then that’s fine and I see why so many devs would carry on using it as transitioning off would be quite the investment in time and effort.
I still see more call for jQuery than React or Angular
I can’t say I see the same thing, I’m seeing jQuery sometimes pop up in requirements list but typically the job ads I’m seeing these days are usually specifying React, or Angular.
Cheers
