Microsoft Silverlight Books

Seminal book on JavaScript

It is no wonder this book gets some mixed reviews. In it lies the distilled knowledge of possibly more than a decade of improving JavaScript by someone who know it inside out. It reminds me of K&R: a very compact, seminal book that presents the philosophy of the language, or should I say the revised philosophy behind the good parts in this case, reasoning its conclusions and presenting best practices for the outstanding new features (all right, closures and prototypal inheritance are not new, but they were dormant in excellent but out of fashion languages). It is also no small feat to have a correlation between programming language theory (what languages should 'do'), different programming paradigms (functional programming, inheritance, loose typing) and how much of it can be achieved in JavaScript. If you -like me- despised the snippets of code embedded in annoying web pages of yore, maybe you will also appreciate the fortunate mixture of Self, C and Scheme that lies inside the /good parts of the/ JavaScript language. To summarize: if you are looking for classical web programming, HTML templating, 'cookbook'-style piles of mind-numbing recipes, look elsewhere. Also, forget the stupid compromises and bad design that went into JavaScript. This work I regard as a gift to the community to highlight features no other mainstream language offers.

Lucia M. Rotger
15 April, 2010

Crockford's book will improve the web

I have tried to learn strong Javascript skills many, many times over more than a decade. My shelves are full of thick 'Bibles' on the topic. The problem has been, amidst all the terrible features of the language (and let's be honest, it has way more than it's fair share), I never had the patience, perseverance or time to break through to the gold. This book is brilliant. From the first chapter, Crockford is speaking my language.

The best bit about all this is that, "the best bits" of Javascript are actually pretty amazing! Deep in my head, by looking at others' work (Google!), I knew that a great language was hidden in there somewhere - but it always eluded me. Those days are finally over!! I can't wait for my next web project!!

I have read more computer books over the past thirty years than I can remember. Despite it's deceptively short length, this is one of the very best.

Damien Sawyer
24 July, 2010

Worth it for Intermediate JS Programmers

The reader of "JavaScript: The Good Parts" by Douglas Crockford will get a very good idea of why JavaScript is considered a runt among programming languages. Crockford does his best to model good programming patterns and style in JavaScript. It is unfortunate and telling that the book is so thin. Crockford neither pulls his jabs at the language nor dumps on it unfairly, but gives a clear rationale for his opinions.

Like JavaScript, the book is more sure of what it is not than of what it really wants to be. Readers should read the preface seriously before going further -- but ignore the contradictory second sentence stating it is for programmers working with JavaScript for the first time. The book will interest language nerds, but it really should be read by intermediate JavaScript programmers who spend too much time debugging code they should never have written.

The short chapters make the book a relatively quick read, despite the somewhat advanced level of the material compared to other JavaScript books. Upon first glance at the size of the book, I was reminded of The Little Schemer (a tutorial on the Scheme programming language). Crockford's writing is easy to read, as if you were collecting thorough notes over a long series of lunch time talks. Incidentally, the structure of the book is unlike "Little Schemer" but Crockford does touch on functional programming techniques.

This book has a strong overtone of frustration with JavaScript. That isn't a criticism of Crockford, but sprinkled throughout the material are the tell-tale signs of what could have been, or should have been, but can never, ever be. It truly gets to a head in Chapter 9, titled "Style", in which 11 paragraphs in three pages start with "I". It is personal for Crockford.

Readers should be aware that there is virtually no error checking in the code. While omitting error checks is a common practice in trade book code samples, Crockford is making a point of illustrating good coding practice. The absence of a disclaimer is odd, but several of Crockford's examples do deal specifically with faulty conditional expressions. Take his warning in the preface to heart again here: "JavaScript: The Good Parts" won't tell you everything you should be doing to write good code.

JavaScript: The Good Parts is not a real reference, but if you do sporadic JavaScript programming it may be a book you will pick up again several times. That's because it is small enough and concise enough to act as a quick reference to the stuff that really is worth using, and some of the parts that really are best avoided.


Mitchell C. Amiano
10 February, 2010

Great for a programmer who needs to learn Javascript

The project I was just moved on to is a web based application we'll be building from the ground up. Many of us on the team don't have any Javascript experience, we all came from a Java background. I haven't read the whole book yet, but what I have read has been quite helpful at lowering the learning curve and starting to learn at least some type of best practices. If you come from a Java background and are familiar with Effective Java, I think this is about as close as you'll get to that for Javascript.

chumpus
26 June, 2010

A good book on JavaScript

A very good introduction to JavaScript. It only deals with the language itself, and doesn't worry about DOM scripting or implementation details and inconsistencies in different browsers; you'll need a different book for that.

Alexey Romanov
01 March, 2010