NF

An essential reference by Douglas Crockford, the programmer who has worked to popularise both the JSON data format and the JavaScript language. With that kind of background Crockford has become an authoritative voice on "the good parts" of the specification and his writing delivers on the promise of providing a programmer with exactly what he needs to know about JavaScript, which has rapidly become the lingua franca of the Web. This book is a handy desk reference at work, if you're still accustomed to dead tree manuals. ( )

I'm afraid I must have read this book too late to recognize it as the great new approach to writing about JavaScript that it likely represented for readers when it was new, judging by the remarkably high regard in which readers have held it for years. I know that the world of JavaScript has undergone great upheaval, and evolved very quickly since this book was first published, and have had the interesting experience of working with JavaScript during some of the fastest-changing times it has yet seen, and this book probably rates better than several other books about JavaScript published before it that I have seen.

It is not, however, a great book when considered in a vacuum, without being graded on a curve with other JavaScript books published as contemporaries to JavaScript: The Good Parts. Taken by itself, solely on its own merits, this book suffers many failings. It is ponderous, overly technical to the extent that it focuses on technical detail to the exclusion of imparting much real meaning all too often, and plagued by a merciless drought in the dryness of its prose. Many interesting trends in programming techniques and tools have crept into the JavaScript world since this book's publication, and one might argue that Crockford should not be blamed for the lack of any reference to these things in this book, but the terrible fact that many of those techniques and tools existed in abundance in what one might call "neighboring" programming language communities, from which he could have drawn inspiration for writing a much better book, leaves me with a sour taste in my mouth upon finally reading JavaScript: The Good Parts. I find that reading a combination of Eloquent JavaScript, Understanding Computation (and employing its ideas in writing JavaScript with the knowledge gained from Eloquent JavaScript), a small number of decent practical online howtos, and learning about software testing from books written for other programming languages would stand you in much better stead than struggling through this short, but arduous, book -- and probably take about the same amount of time to accomplish. Things get worse when considering this book in full awareness of today's resources, where its usefulness is pretty thoroughly eclipsed by better writings published since JavaScript: The Good Parts.

I would not go quite so far in my distaste for this book as to give it only one star, or to warn everyone to avoid it, as I would for Practical OCaml (an unfortunate, gigantic error of authorship and publication that, if anything, probably turned people away from OCaml). It does, after all, actually offer some amount of information not easily found in one place elsewhere -- even if that information is often abstruse to the point of marginal utility (economics pun only subconsciously intended) at best. That is certainly not enough for me to recommend it as worth reading, or to claim I derived any enjoyment from it, though. ( )

A must read for any programmer using JavaScript. ( )

I'd been meaning to read this for years and finally picked up a copy in late 2019, 11 years after it came out. I'd picked up some JavaScript here and there and have been using JSON since it exploded in popularity. Earlier this year I worked through a book on D3, so I had a decent amount of exposure, but there were still some quirks I didn't have my head around.

This very readable book really clarified things, especially about prototypal inheritance and the unfortunate non-block scoping rules. The "good parts" can be summed up as the "functional parts." There are some great code examples of how to use closures and how to build programs using function expressions. I'm a little leery of some of his suggestions, e.g., in Chapter 4 where Function is augmented to obviate the need to type .prototype, if only because I don't know enough about common practice if this advice is generally followed. ( )