Programming

MDN is great, especially for finding current best practice, but I've always found their material much more useful for reference once I'm already familiar with the general usage of whatever I'm trying to use. I often find it difficult to get to grips with something new just with MDN.

I usually go read W3Schools first. It's mostly a bit out of date, but not so much that it's useless, and I find the tutorials much easier to digest. Once I'm comfortable with the basics, I switch to MDN to get up to speed.

And OP, it sounds like you're already wary of this, but don't let yourself be tricked into using a hodge-podge of libraries for every little thing. A lot of JS programmers will tell you that you "need" some library or other to provide a function that you can often replicate with just two or three lines of raw JS, if you know what you're doing.

I think the JS library addiction stems from the bad old days of browser incompatibility, when almost everything had to be wrapped in layers of complex compatibility shims.