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JavaScript: The Good Parts: Working with the Shallow Grain of JavaScript
 
 
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JavaScript: The Good Parts: Working with the Shallow Grain of JavaScript [Kindle Edition]

Douglas Crockford (Author)
4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (32 customer reviews) |
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Book Description

Unearthing the Excellence in JavaScript

Product Description

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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Douglas Crockford
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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
31 of 31 people found the following review helpful
Format: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.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Great, concise book 12 Oct 2011
By jlama
Format:Paperback
I've been a C++ developer for quite some time now. I wrote a few simple web apps recently, using a lot of trial and error (and Google of course) to write and debug the JavaScript code. Many things were not clear to me, e.g. scope of variables, closures, and the language approach for object orientation, inheritance, functions vs. objects. I bought this book hoping to improve my understanding and I found great, clear explanations on all the questions I had as well as new, fresh perspectives from both JavaScript and the book author on classical areas like inheritance.

The book is quite small, I read it in just a few days, but it has all the information I needed. I also bought JavaScript: The Definitive Guide and I really like it too, but it's a different type of book: The Definitive Guide is a thick book, one you probably don't wan't (or can't afford) to read from beginning to end, but it is a great, thorough reference book; The Good Parts on the other hand is a thin book, you can read it all and get great explanations, ideas and suggestions.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I have been programming for longer than I care to remember. These days I use mainly PHP, though have dabbled with Javascript and jQuery when I have been unable to avoid doing so. Given that Javascript has regained a lot of its previous popularity, and is once again socially acceptable, I thought it was about time that I got to grips with it properly.

Typical javascript books seem to be aimed at beginners to programming, or experienced javascript programmers. The latter tend to sail over my head unless they come with decent examples. The former are frustratingly terse when it comes to the meaty matters that you really need to get to grips with if you want to take the language seriously. I guess their logic is that to dwell on such matters would scare the newcomer off.

This book, treads a great middle ground. It is written by somebody who quite clearly knows an awful lot about programming in a variety of languages. In this book, he succinctly explains all the good bits of Javascript that you should be sticking to as much as possible, and also highlights the bad stuff. The thing is, once you have read it a couple of times (it is a short book), not only will you be able to write good javascript code, but you will also be able to forgive javascript for some of the terrible stuff.

Note though, that this book doesn't go into any detail about web matters. You will get no utility functions for manipulating the DOM or anything funky like that. What you will get though, is a thorough grounding in Javascript, the core language, itself.

Prior to reading this book, I have been writing my own lightbox routine. Naturally I having been looking at other examples to see how they did it, but I tended to get lost following their code. Thanks to this book, it all makes a lot more sense.

This is a thoroughly good read IF you are a programmer already, wanting to learn Javascript properly. If you are looking for a few quick fixes, then this book is not for you.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Excellent reference book
Banish all those terrible coding practices that you picked up by copying and pasting snippets of javascript code that you 'found' on the web into the your applications. Read more
Published 3 months ago by mdenieffe
Awesome
There are no more words needed. This book is simply awesome just as everything Mr. Crokford writes. He is a great referent in Javascript development.
Published 5 months ago by Telémaco
Interesting and probably important
I believe this to be an important and interesting book, but I haven't read (studied!) it in detail yet. Read more
Published 6 months ago by Andy G
Ok - but needs more code/examples and a download would help
It's ok - but most people want a load of examples and downloads. Also - the use of flow charts for all examples 'bloats' the book so the content isn't really that much. Read more
Published 6 months ago by Mr. A. White
javascript: the good parts
This is a tough read for a newbie but it does say that it is a book for programmers and by extension therefore not for beginners. Read more
Published 6 months ago by n mills
Ideal for seasoned programmers
You need some experience in programming to get the most out of this book, but the grammar and the theory are so concise and readable that you'll learn very fast. Read more
Published 7 months ago by enosdan
The very good parts
This book has really helped my understanding of javascript. In particular it helped to demystify objects, arrays and functions. I'm a better programmer as a result. Read more
Published 7 months ago by jimbei
Perfect for experienced programmers
This is not a beginner's text. Don't buy pick this book if you think you need to learn to program. This book assumed you are already fluent in at least a couple of other... Read more
Published 7 months ago by Dr. Gkw Koh
Excellent
Superb book and I fundamentally disagree with the negative reviews. This is *definitely* a good book for beginners, you might want to have done a little JavaScript first but I'd... Read more
Published 8 months ago by C. Jack
Good read
Light, profound and thorough book on specialized/specific subjects of advanced Javascript: object oriented programming, good coding style and techniques, etc. Read more
Published 9 months ago by Miguel Correia Ricardo
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Popular Highlights

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There are four patterns of invocation in JavaScript: the method invocation pattern, the function invocation pattern, the constructor invocation pattern, and the apply invocation pattern. &quote;
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The || operator can be used to fill in default values: &quote;
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One way to minimize the use of global variables is to create a single global variable for your application: var MYAPP = {}; &quote;
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