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 offers a detailed explanation of the features that make JavaScript an outstanding object-oriented programming language, and warns you about the bad parts. In the process, "JavaScript: The Good Parts" defines a subset of JavaScript that's more reliable, readable, and maintainable than the language as a whole. Author Douglas Crockford, a member of JavaScript 2.0 committee at ECMA, is considered by many people in the development community to be the JavaScript expert. A beautiful, elegant, lightweight and highly expressive language lies buried under a steaming pile of good intentions and blunders, he explains. The very good ideas include functions, loose typing, dynamic objects, and an expressive object literal notation.Awful ideas include a programming model based on global variables. With "JavaScript: The Good Parts", you can release this elegant programming language from its old shell, and create more maintainable, extensible, and efficient code. The book's topics include: Syntax; Objects; Functions; Inheritance; Arrays; Regular expressions; Methods; Style; and, Beautiful features. Appendices summarize JavaScript's bad parts and awful parts. But the greatest benefit of studying the good parts is that you can avoid the need to unlearn the bad parts. If you want to learn more about the bad parts and how to use them badly, consult any other JavaScript book. JavaScript is the language of the Web - the only language found in all browsers - so avoiding it altogether is not an alternative. But, whether you're managing object libraries or just trying to get Ajax to run fast, Crockford's guidance in "JavaScript: The Good Parts" will help you create truly effective JavaScript code.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5375 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 153 pages

About the Author
Douglas Crockford is a Senior JavaScript Architect at Yahoo!, well known for introducing and maintaining the JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) format. He's a regular speaker at conferences on advanced JavaScript topics, and serves on the ECMAScript committee.

Customer Reviews

JavaScript the language, presented for professional programmers
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.

Good advice
It would make useful reading for someone just starting out with some Javascript programming or, for someone who's been picking it as they went along wants to adopt a more robust and maintainable coding style (that's me). If you want to learn how to program Javascript or want a reference manual, look elsewhere.

There's lots of good information on using Functions, Methods, Closures and Memoisation and others as they were intended to be used. Equally interesting is the section on the bad features. The bit about === and == was something of an eye opener for me (my backgrounds c, c++ and Java).

The examples are short but informative.

The only thing that's stopped it getting 5 stars is the generous whitespace and some rather pointless (IMO) rail road diagrams...

Only just got this book
I only got the book today and I have only really flicked through it.

The first chapter is fantastic and I am so pleased to see someone using syntax diagrams - which start to appear in the 2nd chapter and which are used in appendices.

It talks a little about JSON and moves pretty quickly on to how to use JSON securely.

Including the index it's a 155 pages of highly readable information. A good size for curling up with or reading on a long train journey.

It hasn't been padded out with an extra 150 pages of anecdotes, author humour or inane examples.

This book requires you engage and use your brain, rather than requiring you to switch your brain off under the onslaught of author inanities that too many books of this genre suffer from.

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