JavaScript: The Good Parts
by Douglas Crockford
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Book Reviews of JavaScript: The Good Parts
Book Review: Worst technical book I've read
Summary: 1 Stars
One would think this is a book that beginners, or those who have used javascript by example for some time without really understanding the gritty underlying rules, would pick up to be pointed in the right direction. For a javascript beginner though, which the book claims to be written for, this book is going to be completely indecipherable. There's no clarity in any of the writing. The book is described as 'dense' precisely because so much context is left to the reader to puzzle out.
What do you get with this book? Strong opinions. The only thing that comes across is the author's incredible arrogance. Never is a single point debated or is justification given for the appallingly insulting things he writes about the language's implementation. In the end, it's a muddled slip of a book written for people who are intimately familiar with javascript already but are desperately afraid that they're using it wrong, and are ready to trust Mr. Crockford implicitly based upon his certainty alone.
Book Review: The author thinks a lot of himself
Summary: 3 Stars
I had seen some good reviews of this book but if you think it is going to help you improve your javascript coding a lot think again.
The author starts out telling you how he is the only author that can tell you how to program in javascript - and everyone else is bad.
It does go through what the author considers the "good parts" of javascript and how to use them. He does show some examples as well. I didn't find the examples very compelling. A lot of the good techniques were just showing how to use a small function the author wrote - and most of these I thought would be of limited use.
I did find the appendixes on the "bad parts" to be interesting and useful. I am primarily a java programmer and I never knew that I should not be using == in javascript.
There are some useful parts to this book but I found it to have a lot of fill for such a small book and not a lot of real value.
Book Review: Terse Just to Show He Can
Summary: 2 Stars
Barely helpful. Yes, he identifies the "good parts", but that's it; he doesn't finish the job with explanation. People who fashion themselves as elite programmers will give this book a good review. He repeats himself with cut and pasted text. There are lots of "railroad" diagrams of grammar like some bad Oracle documentation on SQL.
He's pretty impressed with how terse he can be. For example, he doesn't use the ++ operator because he says it's "too tight, too tricky, too cryptic". But then he uses sentences like the following to show just how terse and impressively obscure he can be: "The first thing in a statement cannot be a function expression because the official grammar assumes that a statement that starts with the word function is a function statement." This is followed by nothing.
Oooh...snap...you're so tight. The guy is a JavaScript wizard, but he can't explain or show how to use "the good parts".
Book Review: Great book, skip the first edition or have the errata page bookmarked
Summary: 4 Stars
The content in this book is simply incredible, and it should be read by anyone seriously interested in JavaScript. Many of the other reviews have described the content, but I was shocked to see not one mention of the glaring errors in the code examples.
O'Reilly provides a good errata resource, but every other code example in this book has either a missing semicolon that you have to hunt for (most common) or code that is completely wrong. Perhaps none of this has been mentioned due to the strong merits of the content -- but it appears nobody even did a quick review over the code in this book! If you are going to buy this to have on your desk for years to come, buy it on PDF now and wait for the second edition print for the errata corrections.
With that said, I'm not trying to troll on this great book. I want to give a heads up to people so they don't have to work part-time as a copy-editor.
Book Review: Essential Read For Javascript Developers
Summary: 5 Stars
'JavaScript: The Good Parts' is a beautiful book that is a must-buy for all Javascript developers out there. Written with brevity clearly in mind (total is only a scant 150+ pages), this book will teach you how to become a BETTER Javascript developer and know why you want to do some things one way and avoid the pitfalls of doing things the WRONG way.
This book is all about efficiency and cleanliness. Written by one of the main developers of JSON, this book is organized smartly and craftfully. I love the fact that there isn't bloat and it's very easy to get through this book in no time at all. Does that mean you aren't getting your money's worth with this book??? HELLS NO!!
If you want to improve your Javascript developing skillset you owe it to yourself to pick up this book, it's one of the best books on the market in this subject matter.
***** HIGHLY RECOMMENDED