I'm a long-time C, C++, and Java programmer (videogames, predominantly) learning Javascript to do some web work, so I picked up this book because the reviews were good and the notion appealed to me - learn the subset of this rather sloppy language that you can use as a good language.
My TL;DR version of the review: this book is a hodgepodge of different information about the language, but some of it is so complicated it'll go immediately over the heads of new programmers, and then some of it is so mundane (even pedantic, talking about very specific aspects of coding styles) it felt goofy and out of place. It seems to me that any specific individual reading this book won't really find more than one or two chapters very relevant. I give it 3 stars because the useful parts were useful to me, but I skimmed and ignored 80+% of the book.
Crockford's writing is personable and clear, and the book's organization is straightforward. Here's my chapter-by-chapter breakdown. Note that this is all from my perspective, what I personally found useful or not, but my point is, while other readers will certainly disagree with me about what was useful, I have trouble imagining any one person finding more than about 20% of the book useful.
Chapter 1 is an introduction and high-level explanation of the point of the book.
Chapter 2 covers basic grammar and the likes, which was helpful though it's not aimed at any particular familiarity with other languages so it's trying to be comprehensive, which meant that as an experienced programmer in other languages I had to skim it and just look for differences with what I'm already used to.
Chapters 3 and 4 were the most useful parts of the book for me: the section on objects and functions, data scoping and closure, which really takes a new way of thinking if, like me, you have a lot of experience with languages without closure and anonymous functions and the like. Crockford does a good job of explaining this and giving relevant examples. This section was 20% of the book and was the only section I found really useful.
Chapter 5 covers inheritance. He presents two methods, one using new and constructors like one of the languages I'm more used to, and gives a couple reasons to avoid this, and then digs into the prototypal method, which is unfamiliar to me. The problem is that he uses totally abstract examples here - classes representing animals and methods that return their names or the noises they make - and it was very hard for me to relate it to any actual application, and since the prototypal style is a fundamentally different paradigm I don't feel like I really grasped it from his writing. Since he builds a framework of extension methods throughout the book, once I started to lost his train of logic I was utterly lost. And the "meta" nature of javascript, assigning functions to methods that return other functions that wrap functions, I found it easy to get lost.
Chapter 6 covers arrays. If you've used scripting languages this stuff is very simplistic, a stark change from Chapter 5, which is quite sophisticated. Again, my point here - I don't know who would simultaneously understand Chapter 5 and still find anything in Chapter 6 useful.
Chapter 7 is a significant change of direction; it's a long chapter on regular expressions which I skimmed very quickly since I know them from using perl. This part seemed odd, since regular expressions are common to several languages, and there's nothing particularly unique about javascript's usage of them. It felt a bit misplaced in this book. Certainly they're an important part of the language, but again made me wonder: who's the book for?
Chapter 8 is a reference for core API functionality and his extension methods; this feels like stuff I'd just google while coding, not terribly valuable to me personally.
Chapter 9 is a diversion on coding style, and felt wildly out of place and kind of insulting: if this book is for a seasoned programmer this is just going to trigger unpleasant flashbacks to arguments you had back when you were a junior programmer. If you're a new programmer and this stuff is news to you, other chapters in the book are going to be utterly incomprehensible to you.
Chapter 10, "The Beautiful Parts," is all of a page long, but a nice summary of the good aspects of the language.
Appendices A and B cover some of the "Awful & Bad Parts" of javascript in detail; this was the second-most interesting part of the book to me, though it's brief and you've picked it up if you read the rest of the book. Still, definitely value here. Though worth noting: he inserts some more editorializing here, ala Chapter 9 - he calls out some things that aren't specific to javascript, like switch statement fallthrough, as bad parts, which I found annoying. Stick to aspects unique to javascript and point out real dangers instead of offering advice on very broad aspects of coding style, I kept thinking.
Appendix C is about JSLint, the lint for javascript. It was useful only in the sense that I didn't know JSLint existed, and now I do, but then he gives a long swath of what amounts to JSLint documentation, which I have to imagine exists on the JSLint site, and felt like filler.
Appendix D is about JSON and just some reference information about the format. Maybe useful, but no authorial insight, just docs.
Overall, glad I read it, but I was pretty underwhelmed given the generally great reviews of the book on here.
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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.
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Cannot learn JavaScript from this book
Reviewed in the United States on July 17, 2019
Perhaps if you are a highly intelligent person, you may learn JavaScript from this book. But otherwise it is a bewildering and frustrating book to read. One gets the feeling this was an academic paper written for his colleagues and he added a little 'introduction' material so he could sell the book to the rest of us. There is almost no explanation. This is unlike any other programming language book I have read. What a waste of money. I wish he had actually tried to teach JavaScript through a set of tutorials. At the beginning he starts off very witty and entertaining and one feels this book is a gem. But then as you go on your realize you're not learning JavaScript at all, and then and realize this book is either shallow or it's meant for people who already learned JavaScript. This is a really bad book.
Reviewed in the United States on July 17, 2019
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Top reviews from other countries
Mr. Paul J. Grenyer
Every JavaScript developer with a pre-existing working knowledge of JavaScript should read this book.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 13, 2017Daniel Starns
Short, concise opinionated view towards a great language.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 7, 2019matthew tindall
For me I couldn't just learn out of this book
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 15, 2018
Gary Woodfine
Most programmers wouldn't believe Javascript has good parts! but Douglas Crockford does a great job ...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 1, 2014Mr G.
Concise book from the JS expert
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 23, 2013
