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Product Details
Paperback: 120 pages
Publisher: No Starch Press; 1 edition (February 23, 2014)
Nicholas C. Zakas is a software engineer at Box and is known for writing on and speaking about the latest in JavaScript best practices. He honed his experience during his five years at Yahoo!, where he was principal frontend engineer for the Yahoo! home page. He is the author of several books, including Maintainable JavaScript (O'Reilly Media, 2012) and Professional JavaScript for Web Developers (Wrox, 2012).
One of my favorite things about this book is its length. The printed edition, including the index, is a pleasingly short 97 pages. It is worth pointing out because the information density in the book is quite good--not a lot of fluff. I don't read many tech books cover to cover, but this one I did.
That said, my truly favorite thing is the way the book handles the subject. I've read a number of the currently-popular books on JavaScript, as well as countless articles. What sets this one apart is that JavaScript is approached as a language and not a set of gotchas, or as a simple contrast to other languages, or as a here's-how-you-can-emulate-other-languages, or as a nifty set of tips and tricks. The first chapter dives right in with this approach. Zakas introduces the language on its own terms and exposes important details of how JavaScript handles types, and he carries this same viewpoint throughout. It's quite refreshing, and I'd say that alone makes the book a worthwhile addition to the JavaScript library.
The book isn't (and doesn't pretend to be) a holistic guide to front-end/Web development with JavaScript. It stays focused on presenting JavaScript as a competent language and concisely covers the most important aspects of the language that will enable you to use it in an object-oriented manner. As such, it can't be the only book on your shelf, but in my opinion, it should be on your shelf, unless you are already a master of the language perhaps.
I would definitely recommend it even to experienced Web developers who have done a fair amount of JavaScript programming. Get this and augment it with the more broad-reaching books like the Ninja, Effective, The Good Parts, and so on.
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In the past we years the market has been almost inundated with a multitude of books covering JavaScript. I've read many of them and, in all honestly, I have to say very few are worth reading. Along the years I also managed to read multiple books written by Zakas and I have no problem recommending them all. This book has a clear goal and a pretty well defined audience, it's totally focused on object-oriented programming. The main target are programmers used to other languages that need to understand JavaScript's peculiarities. Junior JavaScript programmers may benefit from this book as well, since it may help bringing their skills to the next step. Seasoned JavaScript programmers may not get that much out of this, but it's still valuable to refresh the various way you can handle objects in JavaScript and the topic often isn't covered so well elsewhere. Beginners and people without decent programming skills instead should look elsewhere.
Once again, Zakas didn't disappointed me, everything is up to his usual standards, his explanations are clear, his approach is always pragmatic and open, covering pro and cons of different solutions. The topics are covered well and in deep, yet there is no redundancy.
The only reason I am giving this book four stars instead of five is that quite often the author suggest using techniques and APIs introduced with ECMAScript 5.x. While this isn't a problem in many environments, it may cause the code to fail on web applications that have to support some browsers. The author most of the times doesn't mention this and expose the readers to potentially tricky compatibility problems.
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The more programming books I read, the more I appreciate shorter books - and this one provides rich content in under 100 pages. This book is not for people new to JavaScript, but rather those with a solid grasp of JS who want to develop an understanding of the somewhat odd world of JS OOP, including prototypes, constructors and mixins.
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As mentioned in other reviews, this is a concise book that would be helpful for people relatively new to JavaScript and for those with more experienced. If you're completely new to JavaScript, you're starting in the wrong place. However, everyone else should get something from this book.
Zakas digs down into how objects really work in JavaScript. He starts with explaining how primitives are converted to objects to access methods on the String, Number, and Boolean objects. After that, he goes into how functions and objects, with particularly attention to all of the different attributes and less typical methods associated with them. For example, how do constructors really work? Do you know how to make object properties immutable by setting it's internal attributes? Did you know that JS properties have built in getters and setters that you can change?
Also, I thought that Zakas gives the best explanation of pseudoclassical inheritance I've read and clearly goes over the implications of various decisions. Every page is worth reading.
Overall, this is a concise and well-written book. He never lost me in boredom or made it painful for me to read. The examples are well-chosen, and the little details he covers will definitely make me a more refined developer.
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I use JavaScript for a considerable amount of time. During the recent year JS is my primary development language on a serious Front-End project. I'm into the 4-th chapter of the book right now and, even though I already knew 98% of the information presented in those chapters, those 2% are well worth the money paid for this book. The most valuable parts for me were those containing the sentence "There's however a caveat to ... " This book is in my list of must-have books now.
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