JavaScript: The Good Parts
by Douglas Crockford
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Book Reviews of JavaScript: The Good Parts
Book Review: High hopes, Sad reality
Summary: 1 Stars
Abstracted from the Preface:
"intended for programmers who, by happenstance or curiosity, are venturing into JavaScript for the first time" 1
"This is not a book for beginners" 2
And this is just the first page of the preface. While preparing comments on this book, I reread the preface no fewer than five times in a vain attempt to divine the meaning behind these conflicting statements.
I emphasize the term "reread" since in crops up real soon:
"it takes multiple readings to get it" 3
The first page of the preface provides the key to understanding this book. The book is far too short on explanations and context. You're forced to read and reread important material to extract any return from your investment. And rereading the material is no guarantee that you get useful insight. So much is assumed that you better have the Rhino book handy.
The sad reality is that with thoughtful treatment, this book could be a blockbuster for advanced JavaScript programmers tasked with building the next jQuery or similar library. Since most programmers are library consumers, this also implies that only a small subset of programmers might benefit from a complete discussion of the advanced subject matter only hinted at in this book. As an aside, It would make the library consumers of the world, well.. better library consumers and there is value in that as well.
1. From the preface, page xi, first paragraph, first sentence.
2. From the preface, page xi, third paragraph, first sentence.
3. From the preface, page xi, fourth paragraph, fourth sentence.
Book Review: Good Book. Well worth the price.
Summary: 4 Stars
JavaScript: The Good Parts, is a concise, well written JavaScript guide intended for JavaScript developers with some degree of experience, and familiarity with the language. It does an excellent job of demonstrating to the developer how to get away from the object oriented class model that most popular languages of today utilize, and use the class free prototypal inheritance model which JavaScript was designed for.
In addition to looking at broad design of JavaScript programming, Crockford points out common mistakes and problems that plague even experienced web developers. This ranges from more complex problems like JavaScript's lack of tail recursion optimization, to the preferred ways of declaring simple arrays and objects. Things any developer can benefit from.
Perhaps the most beneficial aspect of this book are the fully coded functions used to demonstrate shortfalls of JavaScript. These functions, such as is_array(), isNumber(), and trim(), not only provide the reader with an excellent solution, but gives a solid understanding of why the problem exists, and more importantly, why is must be corrected.
Like all books, JavaScript: The Good Parts isn't without problems. While it provides an ample number of examples, some of the examples are overly condensed, and others seem incomplete.
Overall JavaScript: The Good Parts is a valuable book which I would recommend to anybody who wishes to get a deeper understanding of JavaScript, or simply just wants to write more efficient and more soundly structured code.
Book Review: Approachable, no non-sense, thrilling to read, an excellent reference, proof that great books don't have to be huge
Summary: 5 Stars
Weighing in at 140+ pages of content, this book cuts through the obscurities, pleasantries, and filler found in most technical books. Instead, this book dives straight into the heart of the JavaScript language. It presents the clearest comprehensive explanation of what makes JavaScript a great programming language that I've encountered to date. It nails the important concepts, like JavaScript's: object oriented nature, its classless (pseudoclassical) nature, and functional nature. While covering the fundamentals like JavaScript's: functions, lexical scoping, lambdas, prototypal inheritance, and functional inheritance.
This book's size makes it approachable for all audiences, its style is terse and concise. This book has the potential to do for JavaScript, what Richie's inspirational classic the C Programming Language did for the C language.
JavaScript is the programming language of the web (AJAX), and this book will guide you through the good parts of this often misunderstood language - while this book is an excellent reference, it is not intended to replace JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, you'll do best to have both these books on hand.
If you enjoyed (or are considering) this book then you may want to hear more of what Douglas Crockford has to say, check out his great JavaScript video series on the YUI Theater.
Book Review: A Great JavaScript Book for Everybody
Summary: 5 Stars
This is the first book by Douglas Crockford a Senior Software Archtitect at Yahoo. He is widely known as one of the most knowledgeable on JavaScript apart from the creater of JavaScript (Brendan Eich). Douglas Crockford is the creator of JSON and has written many articles and presentations on JavaScript-related topics in web development.
His book JavaScript: the Good Parts, is a short (145 pages including Appendix) but is very useful for the person who wants to expand his/her JavaScript skills and knowledge. It reviews the basics of the language in the first two chapters and then focus on intermediate and advanced topics such as objects, inheritance, arrays, and methods.
The appendix categorizes the "bad" parts of JavaScript that are not good programming syntax and should be avoided such as global variables, scope, eval function, with statement, undefined variables and so forth.
I really like how Douglas Crockford gives you everything you need in this book that is relevant to how modern developers using JavaScript program and helping you understand it easily and quickly. No long-winded explanations or extra "filler" just to make the book longer. He is right to the point and explains it in a coherent, understandable way no matter what your "technical" level is.
This is a very useful book for the client-side developer who wants either a great reference book or somebody who wants to take their skills to the next level using JavaScript.
A must buy!
Book Review: Repetitive, opinionated, and cranky
Summary: 1 Stars
Short but repetitious. A bad combination. Majorly disappointed by this one.
First of all, it's not really a JavaScript book - much of the advice offered is very generic. Like YOU MUST USE PARENTHESES AROUND CONDITIONAL BODIES. Repeated three times. And the evils of ++ and -- operators. The author forbids these even in for loops. Huh?
I don't care about the code for solving the Towers of Hanoi. I want to learn more about JavaScript! Unfortunately the descriptions of prototypes, functions, inheritance, in here are so terse that I have to spend far longer than is necessary in rereading them.
The "railway" diagrams are pure filler. Page after page. Come on, NOBODY reads these.
And what have regexps got to do with JavaScript per se? Nothing... so why do we need a whole chapter on them?
For that matter, why does Yahoo! NEED a "Chief JavaScript Architect"? Bet Google doesn't have one.
JavaScript only survived the first year of its life because Applets were so obviously useless. It only survived its childhood because teenage hackers liked its lack of a type system and its simple way of doing simple things (badly); and it is only alive today because AJAX came along. I wanted this book to change my mind about how awful the language is. It didn't. Instead I got the semi-random ramblings of someone who's invented some fairly trivial tool - JSLint - and thinks it solves everyone's problems. Well, it doesn't. My IDE does a better job these days.