JavaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford
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Book Reviews of JavaScript: The Good Parts
Book Review: Thinking in Javascript
Summary: 5 Stars
This book is for Javascript programmers who have perhaps been at the novice level and now wish to jump up to an intermediate understanding of the language. The language is small but unconventional, and this book tries to help you get your arms around the meatier parts of Javascript. The book tries to get you thinking in Javascript. The author shows you the components of the language and then shows you ways of putting those components together that say something about the design of the language overall. Then, you can go on to designing your own solutions. This is not a reference book and it is not certainly not exhaustive in its discussion of Javascript and its quirks. Instead, this book just contains the things that are really important. It is a rather small book, but it is very clear and illustrative in the concepts that it does cover, and the included examples are complete solutions, not just a line of code here or there. The table of contents are not shown in the product description, so I present that next:
Chapter 1. Good Parts
Section 1.1. Why JavaScript?
Section 1.2. Analyzing JavaScript
Section 1.3. A Simple Testing Ground
Chapter 2. Grammar
Section 2.1. Whitespace
Section 2.2. Names
Section 2.3. Numbers
Section 2.4. Strings
Section 2.5. Statements
Section 2.6. Expressions
Section 2.7. Literals
Section 2.8. Functions
Chapter 3. Objects
Section 3.1. Object Literals
Section 3.2. Retrieval
Section 3.3. Update
Section 3.4. Reference
Section 3.5. Prototype
Section 3.6. Reflection
Section 3.7. Enumeration
Section 3.8. Delete
Section 3.9. Global Abatement
Chapter 4. Functions
Section 4.1. Function Objects
Section 4.2. Function Literal
Section 4.3. Invocation
Section 4.4. Arguments
Section 4.5. Return
Section 4.6. Exceptions
Section 4.7. Augmenting Types
Section 4.8. Recursion
Section 4.9. Scope
Section 4.10. Closure
Section 4.11. Callbacks
Section 4.12. Module
Section 4.13. Cascade
Section 4.14. Curry
Section 4.15. Memorization
Chapter 5. Inheritance
Section 5.1. Pseudoclassical
Section 5.2. Object Specifiers
Section 5.3. Prototypal
Section 5.4. Functional
Section 5.5. Parts
Chapter 6. Arrays
Section 6.1. Array Literals
Section 6.2. Length
Section 6.3. Delete
Section 6.4. Enumeration
Section 6.5. Confusion
Section 6.6. Methods
Section 6.7. Dimensions
Chapter 7. Regular Expressions
Section 7.1. An Example
Section 7.2. Construction
Section 7.3. Elements
Chapter 8. Methods
Chapter 9. Style
Chapter 10. Beautiful Features
Appendix A. Awful Parts
Appendix B. Bad Parts
Appendix C. JSLint
Appendix D. Syntax Diagrams
Appendix E. JSON
If you are new to Javascript I suggest starting with Head First JavaScript (Head First). Once you have read that book, get this book and become someone who thinks in Javascript. At the same time, get JavaScript: The Definitive Guide for the best reference on the language that is in print.
Book Review: Using the good parts will increase quality and save a lot of time and grief
Summary: 5 Stars
I read JavaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford and learned a lot from it.
I feel that he makes very good points on his commentaries on the awful and bad parts of JavaScript and his suggestions to use a "good parts" subset of the language does seem to hold ground and increase quality and development time. At least, that is the case on the project that I'm working on that involves JavaScript. I seem to have fallen to just about all the pitfalls that he points out. Reading his book was a great comfort (I'm not the only one thinking that this or that aspect of the language stinks and for a good reason...) to me and his work-around suggestions do seem to be useful and practical. Along with other two very useful books on JavaScript: Bulletproof Ajax by Jeremy Keith (I have reviewed this book too on Amazon) and AJAX Security by Billy Hoffman and Bryan Sullyvan (see my Amazon review for this book too) I think that any developer that usews JavaScript can get a clear picture on the good sides and bad sides of JavaScript and clear understanding of the "do"s and the "don't"s and the implication of doing things one way or the other.
There are some mild typos in the book, that I'm sure will be corrected in future editions (e.g., pp.60: "... 'shi' has its key changed from '4' to '3'..." should be "... 'shi' has its key changed from '3' to '3'...", I believe).
Considering the fact that the author states several times that the book will avoid the bad parts and concentrate on the good parts, it is quite stressed in the book when bad parts are discussed, and some bad parts are repeatedly being mentioned and the implications of using them along with their proposed work around is also re-iterated (e.g., arguments list which is not really an Array object, or the fact that null is being identified as an object, and there are many more examples).
I liked a lot the "functional" approach, which I enjoy and like to use in many of my Perl scripts and programs, and I also use a lot in my JavaScript scripts and programs. I do find the "functional" way of doing things to be lighter and more straightforward than the classical object oriented approach that many advocate (which I don't really find very useful most of the time). For those that want a non lisp/scheme/haskell introduction to functional programming see a very nice Perl book that introduces functional programming: Higher Order Perl by Mark Jason Dominus (see my Amazon review on the book).
I really really enjoyed reading the book. I found the advise there very useful and I learnd quite a lot of things about JavaScript.
Book Review: Small, but dense
Summary: 5 Stars
When it comes to JavaScript, Douglas Crockford is "The Man". When it comes to browsers, JavaScript is "The Language". "JavaScript: The Good Parts" should be read - and comprehended - by every web developer, regardless of their programming proficiency.
This slim volume contains the essence of the JavaScript language. It is not concerned with the inner workings of JavaScript, nor is it a "Learn JavaScript in a Fortnight" type of book. It is more a meta-JavaScript guide of style, pointing out features and usage not available elsewhere, except perhaps at his website, "Douglas Crockford's Wrrrld Wide Web" (http://www.crockford.com).
Those new to the language may find this book to be like James Joyce's "Ulysses" - that is, incomprehensible. The use of closures, self-reference and passing functions as parameters to other functions takes some time to grasp fully. The end result is worth the time invested: you will be a better programmer for having digested the information provided by Mr. Crockford. Heck, you will be a better programmer even if you don't grok everything put forth in the book.
As the inventor and promoter of JSON, short for "JavaScript Object Notation", Mr. Crockford deserves much praise. JSON is a data interchange format made up of a JavaScript object. There are implementations of JSON for many other languages (visit the aforementioned web site for details). While not strictly a replacement for XML, JSON is as readable, requires no external parser to implement and can be operated on directly in any browser that supports JavaScript, and the major ones do.
I must admit, I am an addicted JavaScript programmer. I found Douglas Crockford many years ago, and while he does not know me, he has mentored me and brought forth a deeper understanding of JavaScript that also applies to programming in general. Comments, the use of whitespace, blank lines; these are things not often found in a web application.
I strive to always be a Good Programmer, and when I find myself slipping into old, bad habits, now I have a book to lift my spirits and show me the way.
Yes, "JavaScript: The Good Parts" is that good.
Book Review: At Long Last, A Serious Javascript Book
Summary: 5 Stars
For about as long as it's been about, Javascript has endured a plague of poorly written and presented books. "A Million and One Ways to Write a Rollover." Many books will treat writing a function as an advanced move. It is left as an exercise for the reader how to manage ones code when the scale surpasses the trivial.
Douglas Crockford, who works at Yahoo, is unable to leave these questions in the realm of the intellectual, and he is in growing company. The era of large Javascript applications is upon us. By large, I mean applications that are mostly javascript, rather than HTML documents with a splash of code. This is more than mere AJAX. This is true application development, and with the scale must come application scale rigor.
It is to the problems of serious application developers that Crockford addresses the book. This is *not* an introductory book. It is generally assumed that the reader knows what the building blocks are.
Instead, Crockford focuses on issues such as organization, error avoidance, and writing code touched by many developers.
More importantly, Crockford expresses opinions. Technology as a field is never short on opinion, but technology books are a wasteland. Good luck finding a volume that spends much time at all criticizing its subject matter. Crockford pulls no punches. If he doesn't care for a given design decision, he says as much. It is, in a word, refreshing. Would that more books offered such candor.
Even if you disagree with Crockford's answers, the exercise of working through his arguments will teach you to ask better questions.
In exchange, you will learn about some of the more powerful but under-used aspects of Javascript, such as closures and first class functions. Furthermore, Crockford's detailed descriptions will give you clearer insight into exactly how the language really works.
In sum, Javascript: The Good Parts is the sort of book that can move you to the next level in your javascript development. Thank the gods the age of platonic, useless JS books is behind us.
Book Review: Sound advice on coding to Javascript's strengths rather than fighting them
Summary: 5 Stars
This book is another in the series of books lately reclaiming Javascript as a powerful language that hasn't gotten it's due (see Stefanov's book for another good example). Crockford makes a great case for Javascript not needing to please the crowd of class based languages and instead using it's prototype functional roots to their max to achieve similar ends (code reuse, inheritance, private data..). His examples showing how to do class styled coding in javascript (though using prototypes in the inside, as that what the language has to offer) followed by a more pure object to object prototyping really sends the point across in comparing elegance and benefits of the latter over the former within Javascript's rules.
I found chapter 5 on the inheritance techniques to be way harder than the other chapters in the book. But after digesting some of it, I proceeded on to the next chapters. They did not build on it so much as they were covering other domains of the language, so it's not a show stopper to understand the rest of what crockford is after to show you which are of course "the good parts" in the other domains (regular expressions, built in objects...). I return to the fifth chapter periodically to further understand everything that's going on there and pick up something else each time.
It was also nice to have the "avoid this" opinion sections entitled "awful parts" and "bad parts". While some may be disputable, it's good to get a heavyweight's reasons on why to avoid them if possible.
The code is usually light and nicely explained. The errata in the oreilly site patch up the few oopsies here and there. I feel definitely more energized to write prototype based Javascript and learn some Ajax libraries without being afraid to peak in at their source if need be now and then.