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Most programming languages contain good and bad parts, but JavaScript has more than its share of the bad, having been developed and released in a hurry before it could be refined. This authoritative book scrapes away these bad features to reveal a subset of JavaScript that's more reliable, readable, and maintainable than the language as a whole-a subset you can use to create truly extensible and efficient code.
Considered the JavaScript expert by many people in the development community, author Douglas Crockford identifies the abundance of good ideas that make JavaScript an outstanding object-oriented programming language-ideas such as functions, loose typing, dynamic objects, and an expressive object literal notation. Unfortunately, these good ideas are mixed in with bad and downright awful ideas, like a programming model based on global variables.
When Java applets failed, JavaScript became the language of the Web by default, making its popularity almost completely independent of its qualities as a programming language. In JavaScript: The Good Parts, Crockford finally digs through the steaming pile of good intentions and blunders to give you a detailed look at all the genuinely elegant parts of JavaScript, including:
- Syntax
- Objects
- Functions
- Inheritance
- Arrays
- Regular expressions
- Methods
- Style
- Beautiful features
The real beauty? As you move ahead with the subset of JavaScript that this book presents, you'll also sidestep the need to unlearn all the bad parts. Of course, if you want to find out more about the bad parts and how to use them badly, simply consult any other JavaScript book.
With JavaScript: The Good Parts, you'll discover a beautiful, elegant, lightweight and highly expressive language that lets you create effective code, whether you're managing object libraries or just trying to get Ajax to run fast. If you develop sites or applications for the Web, this book is an absolute must.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
29 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
JavaScript the language, presented for professional programmers,
By A Reader (Brighton, UK) - See all my reviews
This review is from: JavaScript: The Good Parts (Paperback)
In this small and dense book you will find JavaScript guru Douglas Crockford's presentation of the beautiful subset of a language that lies within JavaScript as a whole. You can use this subset to write serious programs. Occasionally you might have to use some of what Crockford calls "the bad parts", but at least you'll know the dangers, and how to mitigate them.Perhaps more importantly, Crockford is very, very aware of how JavaScript differs from classical OO languages, and how these differences can and do trip up classically trained programmers, coming from (say) C++, C# or Java backgrounds. Crockford goes out of his way to point out the differences and the new way of thinking that is required for JavaScript. This book is not necessarily going to be an easy read, even for professionals. Crockford says so himself in the preface. It's dense and terse. By necessity it introduces terms that might be confusing at first, and which are only explained later. You have to read the whole book, patiently waiting for certain concepts to be explained, and for things to fall into place. On a re-read it all begins to make real sense. I do recommend that this book is read at least twice, preferrably three times. At least it's short! There is not much to do with the web in this book. There's no DOM manipulation examples, and no Ajax calls. You will find no discussion of modern JavaScript libraries. Crockford just focusses on his area of expertise: the JavaScript language. He highlights and promotes the good parts, and in appendices talks about the "Awful" and merely "Bad" parts. This is an important book. Crockford writes with the authority, seriousness and simplicity of K&R. To be a modern web developer you really need to know what you're doing with respect to JavaScript. Look to other books to discuss JavaScript libraries, the DOM, animation effects and Ajax. Look to this book for the starting point to all that: the JavaScript language itself, weird and wonderful, familiar yet strange, bad parts and (fortunately) good parts.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
not as hard as other reviews make you believe,
By johnny "johnny" (Belgium) - See all my reviews
This review is from: JavaScript: The Good Parts (Paperback)
I bought this book before reading all the reviews, and then got a bit scared that it would be too hard to learn anything useful just reading it cover to cover. It's not like that at all. I'm new to javascript, and it was absolutely fine to learn the syntax and concepts, and it actually got my interest in functional programming back up.So I would definitely recommend this book to a computer scientist wanting to find out about javascript as a language, not as a tool to make flashy websites. Of course, the main reason I give it five stars is because it's short :-). I guess my criticism is actually that there's some redundant stuff in the book: the chapter on regular expressions, for example, is fine as a chapter on regular expressions (in javascript), but that's something you would typically look for in reference manuals. The JSON parser is pretty much waste of paper: a url would have been good enough.
15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not for beginners,
By
This review is from: JavaScript: The Good Parts (Paperback)
If you haven't used Javascript for more than 6 months, or if you're just startng your journey into the beautiful world of the world's most misunderstood language, do NOT buy this book. This book is full of good advice, but it is written in a style and language which will make sense only to professional javascript programmers.I'd suggest that you read the Rhino bookJavaScript: The Definitive Guide first, and then read this book to improve your javascript skills. It is definitely a must read because it lays down some of the very advanced concepts lucidly, but it'll confuse and frustrate you if you haven't had a decent exposure to javascript. Recommended only to experienced javascript programmers.
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