JavaScript: The Good Parts
by Douglas Crockford
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Book Reviews of JavaScript: The Good Parts
Book Review: Falls short of expectations
Summary: 3 Stars
The aim of this book is to cover the good features of JavaScript and how to use them well, while avoiding the poor features and many of the pitfalls of JavaScript. To a large extent, the author succeeds in explaining the good subset of JavaScript well enough that an experienced programmer might be able learn JavaScript from the book. Unfortunately, the index doesn't list many of the pages in the book where the features are discussed (e.g. throw is explained on page 32, but the index does not list that page under the entry for "throw") so that it can be difficult to use the book as a reference. There are no exercises to help the reader practice the advice given. Basic advice such as declaring all variables using "var" isn't given. The author explains how to use an object to prevent polluting the JavaScript namespace, then later advocates polluting the namespace by adding methods to the Array object. Heaven forbid if another reader of this book adds methods of the same name that are subtly different, and you try to integrate your code with his! With more detailed explanations of the features of JavaScript covered in the book, well-chosen exercises, a good index, and with more basic tips on good JavaScript style, this could be a great book. As it is, it is merely good. I would suggest learning JavaScript from another book, such as Flanagan's JavaScript: The Definitive Guide. The author's tool for helping JavaScript programmers stick to the good parts, JSLint, is very helpful whether or not you read the book.Book Review: The True Clues om JavaScript
Summary: 5 Stars
I was reading Coders at Work and came to the chapter on Doug Crockford. I was impressed enough to put the book down and order this one. As soon as it arrived I read it from cover to cover (it's short).
This is my first encounter with JavaScript (I am an experienced C, C++, and Objective-C programmer). Crockford's approach, teaching a subset of the language and explaining clearly why you should avoid the rest of it, was exactly what I needed. There's a lot of emphasis on JavaScript's best feature, namely closures or lambda functions, and the explanation of this concept is the clearest that I've read, with plenty of well-made examples. Conversely, I feel the book has saved me a lot of time and frustration by steering me away from the bad features.
Crockford has strong opinions, which may not be to everybody's liking. But this book really does provide the True Clues. Since it is quite brief and compressed, I went looking for a bigger JavaScript book and found Object-Oriented JavaScript: Create scalable, reusable high-quality JavaScript applications and libraries. Its view of JavaScript is fully compatible with Crockford's. Another supplement I recommend is Crockford's video talks at [...]
Book Review: The Good Parts are Pretty Good
Summary: 3 Stars
JavaScript: The Good Parts, by Douglas Crockford.
Mr. Crockford writes a fine book for anyone who uses or needs to use JavaScript - ever. He quickly presents his view on JavaScript, that it can be a powerful and expressive language, but that it has some rather large warts. The author quickly leads the reader through an introduction to JavaScript, and shows how to avoid the major pitfalls inherent in JavaScript.
This book is fairly terse and not so much a learn-JavaScript book as it is a guide. The beginner embarking on a journey through the JavaScript jungle should certainly purchase this book as a companion to another more beginner-friendly book, to help clarify (and possibly correct) points being taught. I enjoyed JavaScript: The Good Parts, and recommend it to any one who works with or will work with JavaScript. It will make a big difference. Before taking a look at this book, I certainly would have happily criticized this language, but the author makes several good points and made me reassess my opinion of JavaScript. If I am ever in a position where I develop with JavaScript, you can be sure that this guide will be by my side, helping me to avoid the many pitfalls and use JavaScript to its full effectiveness.
JavaScript: The Good Parts
Book Review: Seminal book on JavaScript
Summary: 5 Stars
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.Book Review: One of the best JavaScript small references book
Summary: 5 Stars
JavaScript: The Good Parts by Crockford is written to be a quick and small reference for the javascript programmer.
It is not an exhaustive reference but rather a small collection of guidelines on how javascript code should be written.
The book touches on the major aspects of the language: objects, functions, prototypes, inheritance (with all its flavours), arrays and regular expressions.
Maybe the most important part of the language is given the most pages: functions. The chapter on functions gives a good understanding on function invocation patterns, on closures, callbacks, scope, augmentation, memoization, currying and function arguments.
Another important chapter is on inheritance and explains different inheritance styles. Although nice to read in general, the book also has some boring parts, like chapter 2 where javascript grammar is represented in many diagrams, one for each language construct.
There are some nice appendix chapters on the awful and the bad parts of javascript, which warn the reader of the possible pitfalls of using these parts of the language.
Alltogether, it's a must-have book for every javascript programmer, not necesarrily to take up all ideas but at least to understand the point Douglas Crockford has and only adopt the agreed practices.