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The "You Don't Know JS" book series is intended to bring us all (myself included!) to terms with the reality that there's an awful lot of JS that we think we kinda know, but we don't really have total confidence in. Rather than leaving these topics to the misunderstanding, and treating certain things as a black box we can't understand, we dive deeply into them and try to uncover exactly how and why they work.
It is my hope that you will come away from these books with a much deeper confidence in, and appreciation for, JavaScript. Isn't it time we all start really knowing JS?
About the Author
Kyle Simpson is an Open Web Evangelist from Austin, TX. He's passionate about JavaScript, HTML5, real-time/peer-to-peer communications, and web performance. Otherwise, he's probably bored by it. Kyle is an author, workshop trainer, tech speaker, and avid OSS community member.
Not only does the author know what he's talking about, he knows how to communicate it. As a long time Java programmer, many of the aspects of JavaScript were mysterious and obtuse, or at least the way they were explained made them seem that way. Scope and Closure are two of those aspects and now they seem simple obvious artifacts of the functional nature of the JavaScript language. Now all the patterns that the other books demonstrate but don't bother to explain seem much more clear. I can look at the language with new eyes and new understanding. Highly recommended for anyone that needs an under-the-hood understanding of JavaScript and anyone that wants to side-swipe smug job interviewers that want to trip you up with manufactured mis-understandable code.
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Let me first start off by saying that I think this book is great! It is written very well and it seems as though Kyle is right beside you talking you through the book. The book is a short read and really attempts to focus on just a few parts of Javascript and explains them from multiple angles using code samples and just plain old explanation. What is great is that Kyle does not just rewrite what he read in another Javascript book/resource/documentation, trust me I read alot of books on programming including javascript and authors do paraphase(copy) other peoples explanations on topics and place it in their book. However Kyle, really put thought into explaining these topics from his own perspective that he thought would give his points the furthest reach.
Now with all the great things I have said about this book I have to give a word of caution. In my opinion I do not think this book is for someone absolutely new to Javascript. This book will more benefit you if you have read another introductory Javascript book(though they are much longer), tried out some Javascript code and scratch your head asking what the heck is going on with this Javascript code.
So in my opinion I would say if you are fresh to Javascript buy this book along with an introductory Javascript book. Make sure you keep this book on hand when you feel yourself with some question about scope and closures because trust me there is no one that has tried Javascript and not have questions regarding scope and closures and this book is top notch in the clarification of those topics.
I look foward to reading the other books in this series when they are released.
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This book is like a UNIX command: it does one thing, and it does it well. The shortness of this book is one of its redeeming qualities, as it can be read rather quickly. Some people might like having a handy tome, but most of those tomes seem to be optimized for reference rather than straight reading. And if you have a physical book, those kind of tomes are heavy.
The book covers scope and closures, topics that are not always understood by JavaScript developers with working experience or developers coming from other languages. It's good that the book starts at an intermediate level and assumes you have basic JavaScript knowledge, so it does not have to cover syntax, loops, conditionals, objects, etc. If you are a beginner, stay away.
I didn't think the coverage of left-hand side and right-hand side in chapter 1 was relevant for the book, but that seems to be the only "extraneous" part of the book. The author created four appendix chapters to cover "extra" material.
The coverage of closures was particularly fascinating, because as the author pointed out, we've all seen closures, but we didn't know they were there in the code. The book has the BEST explanation of closures I have read yet. I think Kyle's explanation of closures even trumps John Resig's explanation of closures from his book, "Secrets of the Javascript Ninja."
Overall, I found the book easy to read, and it helped better my understand of these two topics of JavaScript.
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While this book attempts to demystify javascript scope and closures for javascript developers, it makes the topic mildly less mysterious. After reading this book, I think the explanation of both topics feels unfinished. I may go and re-read this book again. Its like The Good Parts without the immediately good even if controversial ideas in it.
The author rather than try to fit in a full discussion on scope and closures elects to put additional information into an appendix which takes the reader away from very relevant and related questions that would likely further the readers understanding of the subject matter without having to skip all over the place. Usually, I tend to think of an appendix as off topic, related and useful information rather than a way to artificially keep the chapters short.
LHS/RHS scope explanation feels out of place being located in the first few chapters of this book. (Note: On some level I understand the logic of it being here.) Somehow I feel like its a complex theoretical topic being thrown at you right away before you have a solid context. The author probably could be more successful with explaining LHS/RHS scope by starting with day to day scoping problems developers have with their code now. Instead it comes off as too theoretical too fast and if you are not already well versed on compiler theory you can get lost right at the beginning of the book.
The question becomes are we trying to explain scope to developers who do not understand scope or are we trying to sound smart to developers who probably already understand scope.
The other thing I think is lacking with this book's explanation of scope is this and passing scope around and executing functions in a scope outside of their own.Read more ›
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