Project ideas to master JavaScript
This question is the following of my other question here: Cannot understand node.js
I decided to learn JavaScript, however and in spite of I learn by doing, I don't find anything I can be doing in order to learn JavaScript.
What projects do you recommend me to start? What cool things can I do to improve my skills from beginning to master? Please don't propose almost impossible projects for a beginner, I'd like to know everything about JS but starting from something not very easy but not very hard.
Answer
If you want to learn about JavaScript with the intent of understanding the language itself and Node.js, you should not do anything that has do to with a browser. That will just force you to focus on quirks and silly DOM-things. Even jQuery would be wrong in my opinion as it is a framework for working with the browser.
Write a good old regular command-line program. Write a Blackjack game. If you like maths, solve some Project Euler problems. If you want to do some asynchronous and web-like things, scrape a website for info and print it in the terminal. Or make a tiny website using Node.js as a server.
Really, just do anything, but stay away from browser scripting (unless that is what you want to learn) :)