JavaScript: The Good Parts 1st Edition

by Douglas Crockford (Author)

440 customer reviews

ISBN-13: 978-0596517748

ISBN-10: 9780596517748

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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 scrapes away these bad features to reveal a subset of JavaScript that's more reliable, readable, and maintainable than the language as a whole—a subset you can use to create truly extensible and efficient code.

Considered the JavaScript expert by many people in the development community, author Douglas Crockford identifies the abundance of good ideas that make JavaScript an outstanding object-oriented programming language-ideas such as functions, loose typing, dynamic objects, and an expressive object literal notation. Unfortunately, these good ideas are mixed in with bad and downright awful ideas, like a programming model based on global variables.

When Java applets failed, JavaScript became the language of the Web by default, making its popularity almost completely independent of its qualities as a programming language. In JavaScript: The Good Parts, Crockford finally digs through the steaming pile of good intentions and blunders to give you a detailed look at all the genuinely elegant parts of JavaScript, including:

Syntax
Objects
Functions
Inheritance
Arrays
Regular expressions
Methods
Style
Beautiful features

The real beauty? As you move ahead with the subset of JavaScript that this book presents, you'll also sidestep the need to unlearn all the bad parts. Of course, if you want to find out more about the bad parts and how to use them badly, simply consult any other JavaScript book.

With JavaScript: The Good Parts, you'll discover a beautiful, elegant, lightweight and highly expressive language that lets you create effective code, whether you're managing object libraries or just trying to get Ajax to run fast. If you develop sites or applications for the Web, this book is an absolute must.

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From the Publisher

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From the Preface

This is a book about the JavaScript programming language. It is intended for programmers who, by happenstance or curiosity, are venturing into JavaScript for the first time. It is also intended for programmers who have been working with JavaScript at a novice level and are now ready for a more sophisticated relationship with the language. JavaScript is a surprisingly powerful language. Its presents some challenges, but being a small language, it is easily mastered.

My goal here is to help you to learn to think in JavaScript. I will show you the components of the language and start you on the process of discovering the ways those components can be put together. This is not a reference book. It is not exhaustive about the language and its quirks. It doesn't contain everything you'll ever need to know. That stuff you can easily find online. Instead, this book just contains the things that are really important.

This is not a book for beginners. Someday I hope to write a JavaScript: The First Parts book, but this is not that book. This is not a book about Ajax or web programming. The focus is exclusively on JavaScript, which is just one of the languages the web developer must master.

Book Description

Unearthing the Excellence in JavaScript

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.

Paperback: 176 pages
Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1st edition (May 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 9780596517748
ISBN-13: 978-0596517748
ASIN: 0596517742
Product Dimensions: 7 x 0.4 x 9.2 inches
Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 440 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #22,356 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2 in Books > Computers & Technology > Programming > Functional
- #7 in Books > Computers & Technology > Programming > Web Programming > JavaScript
- #14 in Books > Textbooks > Computer Science > Software Design & Engineering

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Michael Stanford

Kindle edition riddled with errors dating back to 2008

June 1, 2014

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

I love the concept: Javascript is a diamond in the rough. Discard the rough and you will be working with a diamond.

I also like the concrete advice: the parts of Javascript to use, the parts to discard, and the parts to beware of.

I also like the explanations: how and why the good parts work. But this is where I begin to have reservations about the book. Some of the explanations are incomprehensible because of poor editing. How is it possible that a collection of technology pace-setters (Crockford, O'Reilly, Amazon) can leave numerous "confirmed serious technical mistakes" in their work uncorrected for at least 4 years (I bought it in 2012)?

O'Reilly's errata website for this book lists 157 'confirmed' errata, of which 9 are classified as "Serious Technical Mistake." There are also 22 "unconfirmed errata." Most of the confirmed errata were marked as fixed shortly after publication, but at least one of them ("beget") is still in the Kindle edition. O'Reilly helpfully provides downloadable copies of the example code online, but the current version still contains errors that prevent the code from running (mode/node).

I keep going back and re-reading this book, so looking past all my wasted time trying to make sense of the errors, I would give a correctly edited edition of this book five stars for the educational insights sprinkled through it. Or maybe not any more. The state of the art has changed. For example, as many one-star reviewers point out, the whole section on Object.create is outdated. This book needs a rewrite.

28 people found this helpful

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Bruce

For me this book is perfect. I have a lot of experience developing production ...

November 8, 2015

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

For me this book is perfect.

I have a lot of experience developing production applications using C/C++ in the past. I started learning JavaScript and found it easy to get started with. The online tutorials do a good job of exposing the syntax and basic concepts. Javascript is not interpreted C/C++, I found that it more resembled LISP the way it was used. I was definitely confused by the language (what is with all this function within a function stuff?) and I wanted to understand how the language works (literally how it is implemented).

Douglas clarified the concepts for me and now I feel more confident understanding how to use JavaScript. Also, he points out some major pitfalls, e.g. understanding how Arrays work is key to using them.

This book is NOT for beginners to programming.
This book is very opinionated on what the core language constructs are and how to use them and avoid the other parts.
This book is small but quite dense. I must have re-read some sections 5-6 times along with gathering other sources and running through some online examples. Probably depends on your background and level of experience with JavaScript but the concepts were pretty new to me.
Chapters 4&5 really get to the meat of JavaScript.
The book is an excellent reference and recommend owning it if you want to do serious programming with JavaScript.

Also, you can find Crockford on youtube quite easily. I went through his excellent series here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxAXlJEmNMg&list=PL7664379246A246CB

Enjoy!

Update: Note: I have purchased 3 O'Reilly books in the last couple of months. Each one of them has literally fallen apart. I will be reading a page and the page will come out of the binding. I am fairly gentle on the books so I think there is a binding problem at O'Reilly.

13 people found this helpful

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David M Bristor

Essential if you're going to write JavaScript.

April 25, 2018

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

I'd rate this 5 stars if it were updated to ES6. I used it 10 years ago, but hadn't written JS since then. When a project appeared that's ripe for JS, it was the first book I bought. Most of it is still relevant. It's definitely not a beginner's book, but IMHO should be in every JavaScript developer's library. Some of the content is less relevant, due to "improvements" in JavaScript. I quote "improvements", because most of them are syntactic sugar and the core deficiencies in JS are still there (and possibly more lurking in said "improvements").

I can't be sure, but my guess is that adhering to this book's practices has saved me many hours of frustration.

6 people found this helpful

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Michael Sankovich

A must read for any JS developer. Even though ...

January 27, 2018

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

A must read for any JS developer. Even though the code is a bit outdated with the recent EcmaScript updates, the information within is still relevant.

6 people found this helpful

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Uncle Culpepper

Great, detailed information for those who need to write a lot of complex JS

September 30, 2016

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

The average person, who uses javascript minimally like a person who doesn't want to have a nervous breakdown when dealing with scripting languages, probably won't need much that's in here. You could probably just toss your code into jsLint and be done with it. But, if you need to write complex interfaces and do a lot of calculations and treat JS as if it were an object oriented language, this is practically a must-read. Honestly, it has a lot of nice tips and ideas that let you know how javascript works that go really deep with it. I've had to write pages and pages of javascript for this project I've been working with and having read this has made my work go a lot smoother. Now if only I could get my co-workers to read it...

The most important things I've gotten out of this were a solid understanding of how javascript's 'this' works, and a lot of good tricks for simulating a class object. (could you do it with TypeScript? I mean, yeah, but why go through the effort of making that part of your project when you've got all the tools available already?)

3 people found this helpful

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rrs209

Railroad Diagrams FTW!

January 15, 2017

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

This is a great book for anyone interested in JavaScript. The beginning goes a bit too deep into JS's muddy background but I guess it's somewhat helpful to know about why JS is chock-full of browser discrepancies.

My absolute favorite part of this book is the "railroad diamgrams" as they helped my fully understand how JS's syntax works, how and when white space becomes significant, and why things work the way they do (or don't). A++ D.C. ... thanks!

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