JavaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford
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Book Reviews of JavaScript: The Good Parts
Book Review: Do proper OO with JavaScript by tapping into its Functional core
Summary: 5 Stars
Java is an Object-Oriented language; JavaScript ain't. JavaScript provides no integrated support of type-inheritance, encapsulation or polymorphism - the cornerstones of the Object Oriented paradigm.
However, OO programming can be SIMULATED in JavaScript. There's more than one way to achieve this effect. In this short and illuminating title, Crawford delineates one such way, which relies on some peculiar features JavaScript has in common with functional programming languages, such as "Scheme". (Study the ASP.NET AJAX framework's client side, for a completely different way to go about it. Gallo et al.'s "ASP.NET AJAX in Action" explores this framework brilliantly).
In parallel, this book also serves as a well-reasoned best-practices manual for writing good JavaScript code (a la Crawford...). Crawford's simultaneously a fierce critic, and a starry-eyed lover of the language.
Her smiles, her frowns, her ups, her downs are, clearly, second nature to him, and, like a great tour guide, he'll walk you through the grotesque and the beautiful of this strange, and, oddly, remarkably popular, programming language.
This book is neither an introduction to JavaScript nor a reference thereto. It's certainly not about DOM scripting. The novice JavaScripter would benefit little from it, and, in fact, might find it utterly disheartening, due to Crawford's explicit, harsh criticism. Turn, instead, to the first and third parts of Flanagan's excellent "JavaScript, The Definitive Guide".
In the appendices of this books, you'll find a superbly succinct-yet-exhaustive descrpition of the popular JSON data-interchange format, of which Crawford himself is the designer. A complete listing of a JSON parser written in JavaScript is also available for you to delight in.
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: 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: 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.