JavaScript: The Good Parts
by Douglas Crockford
|
List Price: Our Price: $16.50 You Save: $13.49 (45%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $13.50 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of JavaScript: The Good Parts
Book Review: Appallingly bad book
Summary: 1 Stars
A slim book that does little to encourage good JavaScript coding practices. OK, the JavaScript language is flawed as the title of the book implies, but the author defends one of its most flawed aspects - loose typing - in the very first chapter. Note that I call it loose typing, as calling it dynamic typing would be doing a disservice to languages that have a better dynamic type system. The author encourages the reader to not use unary ++ and -- operators, because he claims it's been the cause of bugs in C code. This is bizarre - does "i += 1" rather than "++i" really avoid potential problems in C, and of what relevance is that to JavaScript even if it did? Crockford talks about functional programming a lot, but a lack of support for immutability and scoping makes this an unlikely paradigm that would be of any benefit to JavaScript coding. The code examples are poorly written (nesting statements up to nine levels deep in several places) with little, or more often, no commentary. This lack of commentary would be acceptable if the code was clear, but is more often obscure and hackish.
In summary, I'd give this book no stars if possible, and suggest looking elsewhere a decent book on JavaScript.
Book Review: Don't code against the grain, stick to the good parts.
Summary: 5 Stars
According to the author, one of the biggest problems with JavaScript is that most people don't bother to learn the language before they start using it. Indeed, I was one of those people. My first impression of JavaScript was that it was flaky and fragile and very difficult to write robust production quality code in. It wasn't until I came back to JavaScript this year and read this book that I realized that most of my impressions were wrong and that if I coded with the grain, JavaScript is actually quite good and very powerful. This author does an excellent job of pointing out that though JavaScript shares its syntax with Java, C++ and C#, its actually a lot closer to lisp or scheme in the way you should go about programming with it. He carefully discusses what parts of the language to use liberally and what parts to avoid. As a professional developer with many years experience with C++ and C#, I found this book really helped me finally grok this language. Be thankful when you see how thin this book is. Each page is loaded with details and so it will take more work than you expect to wrap your head around all the great information.Book Review: Excellent way to become fluent in Javascript.
Summary: 5 Stars
I decided to pick up this book because I had been using Javascript for years as a "garnish" on top of my web development, but usually only in the form of a few hacked-together utility functions and edited scripts. In truth, I was afraid of the language - it appeared to be a very inconsistent, buggy system that took arcane knowledge to master across browsers. After starting to work with a number of JS frameworks, I knew I needed to confront the language and learn it properly.
This book is possibly one of the best technical/programming related books I have had the pleasure of reading. It doesn't try to be a massive encyclopedic volume like most of my other technical books, so I didn't have to devote countless hours and days pushing through lengthy filler. Every section contains brief information about the most critical parts of Javascript you need to begin coding what you need right away in a tidy object-oriented fashion. If you have experience with any other C-based language and understand general OOP concepts, this book will make you fluent in Javascript with the least amount of time and effort on your part!
Book Review: Excellent, Dense Reference
Summary: 5 Stars
If you are familiar with programming and need to add JavaScript to your tool belt, this book will quickly teach you not only the syntax of JavaScript, but how to best employ it. The book is short but thorough; by focusing only on the "good parts" of JavaScript and giving you design patterns on how to use them, it succeeds in giving you only the information you need to become a good JavaScript programmer, and no more. It will not teach you everything about JavaScript, or help you read badly written JavaScript. The author states that the book is not a reference, but I believe it is more of a reference than a how-to book.
Many of this book's topics are covered at Yahoo's "YUI Theater" in a collection of the author's lectures (http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/theater/ anything by Douglas Crockford). If you are interested in YUI at all, this book will help you understand the conventions used in YUI.
To paraphrase the author, if you want a book that teaches you how to be a horrible JavaScript programmer, get any other JavaScript book.
Book Review: Not what I expected
Summary: 3 Stars
I read the reviews of this book and others about JavaScript before I purchased this one. I'm late getting around to learning JS, but I figured that my knowledge of other programming languages would sustain me while I learned JS from one of the masters.
I found the book to be terribly frustrating. I got as far as Chapter 5, Inheritance, before I gave up on it. The book was too full of jargon, and even though it was written for experienced programmers just getting started in JS (like me), it seemed to assume a set of prior knowledge that I didn't have.
The author obviously knows his stuff. The language flows well and is logically organized. The syntax diagrams are clear and easy to follow if you're an experienced programmer. The book is well organized, and well edited. O'Reilly did their usual excellent job with it. It's simply not a good resource for learning JS from scratch.
I will return to this book after I learn JS from some other source. It may make more sense the second time around.