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41 of 42 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Hit the sweet spot for me!, October 14, 2010
This review is from: JavaScript Patterns (Paperback)
It's often difficult to find good intermediate to advanced technical books that help you get over the hump. This is most definitely one of those books, IMO, along with Javascript: The Good Parts by Crockford and High Performance JavaScript by Zakas. If you're a beginner, even an ambitious beginner, such as an experienced programmer in another language, you don't want to start here. For beginners, I'd recommend Zakas (Javascript for Web Developers) as the most complete introduction to Javascript, the DOM and browser scripting; or Simply JavaScript from Sitepoint for a gentler introduction that emphasizes the separation of structured content (HTML), presentation (CSS) and behavior (scripting the DOM with Javascript). OTOH, if you're more or less comfortable with core Javascript and the DOM but want to clarify and explore the many idiosyncracies and fine points of JS, this book really hits the sweet spot. The table of contents is available on Amazon or O'Reilly, so I won't recap it - but will mention that Stefanov both chooses his topics and covers and organizes his material very well. This is a precisely and well-written book, and the reader will infer that there must have be a lot of experience, previous history and discussions behind these 200+ pages. I've read the blogs of the majority of his technical reviewers and believe you're in good hands here. I'm really lovin' this book. The only caveat - don't expect a lot on browser scripting. However, I'd be surprised if the somewhat experienced, but non-ninja, Javascript programmer did not significantly take his/her knowledge to a higher level after reading JavaScript Patterns. * * * Addendum: I was interrupted by a rush job during my initial reading of this book and after returning to it now and rereading the early chapters and carefully reading several of the later chapters, I'm even more impressed by this book. The heart of the book, when it gets a little more advanced (functions, object creation patterns and code re-use patterns) has proved really valuable.
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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
At last! A readable, expert book on JavaScript patterns, October 24, 2010
This book is not for the newbie JavaScript programmer (for the complete beginner I suggest JavaScript: The Missing Manual). It assumes some deep knowledge about the language and one is well advised to have read Douglas Crockford's JavaScript: The Good Parts before venturing into this book. Having said that, this book is just simply amazing!. It is very obvious that the author knows his subject, knows how to write and knows what problems people actually have. This is no small feat, as most programming books usually fails in one or more of these areas.
The book covers numerous inheritance and code reuse techniques, including most of the GOF patterns, but does also suggest several novel ways to take advantage (and not hack around) JavaScripts prototypical nature. I especially liked the code "tours", where the author spends considerable time developing a solution step by step, demonstrating pitfalls and side effects while simultaneously anticipating questions the reader might have. These JavaScript vistas has added considerably to my knowledge of the language, and I expect I will comeback to them again in the future (this book can easily take a second and third reading).
In summary, a very elegant written book containing an incredibly amount of knowledge, at a great price. Quite possible the best book on JavaScript in existence - highly recommended.
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Really useful book, November 3, 2010
This review is from: JavaScript Patterns (Paperback)
This book is really awesome, from the beginning to the end, the author shows useful tools to improve the javascript programming.
With more than 30 patterns the author goes from basic concepts, such as avoiding globals, using single var declarations, precaching length in loops, following coding conventions, running JSLint, etc., to advanced ones like variable hoisting, select algorithms at runtime, proxy objects, loading strategies, javascript optimization and a lot of more.
What I liked about the book was the way in which the author explains and illustrates the patterns and how well organized the book is written, this book helped me to understand in a better way some javascript techniques with several solutions to a common scenarios.
I recommend this book if you want to write better code, if you want to understand how the libraries are written or if you want to write your own javascript library. It helps a lot to understand the javascript core and the fundamentals and helps also to be more productive taking care of performance and maintenance of javascript code.
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