by Douglas Crockford
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Product Description
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 highlyexpressive 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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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Excellent Resource for JavaScript, 2008-07-20
I'll keep this short and sweet (like the book). This book distills the JavaScript language down to the bare essentials that a programmer will need to write clean, powerful code. It even tells you what to avoid along the way. Douglas Crockford takes a veritable pig of a language and turns it into delicious ham, bacon, and chops.
For someone serious about JavaScript, there are two books to own. JavaScript: The Definitive Guide to learn the language and its syntax (in minute detail), and this book, to learn how to use the language well.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
A Great JavaScript Book for Everybody, 2008-07-07
This is the first book by Douglas Crockford a Senior Software Archtitect at Yahoo. He is widely known as one of the most knowledgeable on JavaScript apart from the creater of JavaScript (Brendan Eich). Douglas Crockford is the creator of JSON and has written many articles and presentations on JavaScript-related topics in web development.
His book JavaScript: the Good Parts, is a short (145 pages including Appendix) but is very useful for the person who wants to expand his/her JavaScript skills and knowledge. It reviews the basics of the language in the first two chapters and then focus on intermediate and advanced topics such as objects, inheritance, arrays, and methods.
The appendix categorizes the "bad" parts of JavaScript that are not good programming syntax and should be avoided such as global variables, scope, eval function, with statement, undefined variables and so forth.
I really like how Douglas Crockford gives you everything you need in this book that is relevant to how modern developers using JavaScript program and helping you understand it easily and quickly. No long-winded explanations or extra "filler" just to make the book longer. He is right to the point and explains it in a coherent, understandable way no matter what your "technical" level is.
This is a very useful book for the client-side developer who wants either a great reference book or somebody who wants to take their skills to the next level using JavaScript.
A must buy!
0 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
 some value - because it's cheap, 2008-07-07
it's amazing that many great people don't know how to teach...somebody who loves this language so much to write so little and not explaining and providing examples......
The same thing you could find online.....
Don't take me wrong, you will learn a thing or two, but that's not the point.
So called diagrams or flow, whatever they are, they are totally useless.
4 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
trite and trivial, 2008-06-28
I have to wonder if the positive reviewers actually read much of this, it's so surface. This book will neither teach you javascript nor interest the experience programmer for more than about 15 minutes.
The money could be much better spent on a truly useful book.
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
Wish I had this book when I first started Javascript, 2008-06-27
Do you struggle when creating objects in Javascript?
Do you find the syntax to be non-intuitive and frustrating?
Do you know the difference between using a function as an object vs using an object literal?
Do you know how using object literals can simplify your code and create something similar to namespaces?
Do you know how to augment the type system -- for example, if wanted all strings to have a trim() method?
Do you know why the "new" statement is so dangerous? Do you know an alternative that eliminates the use of "new" entirely?
These are some of the topics that the book touches upon.
This book is aimed at someone with intermediate programming experience that wants to know the best way to create and use objects, arrays, types, etc. Crockford takes his experience with Javascript to show you best practices coding techniques and styles to use with Javascript. In addition, the book provides insights into what makes Javascript so confusing and what can be done about it.
You might ask "Isn't this stuff already covered in other books that I have?" The answer is no. For one, most other books use a psuedo-classical coding style (see below) to explain objects that is a source of confusion.
Javascript can be very confusing, especially for programmers who have extensive experience in other C-based languages (like myself). Writing good Javascript that uses objects, methods, etc. is hard. In Javascript, if you want to create objects, use inheritance and create methods, you have several different ways to write your code and it's difficult to know what the strengths and weaknesses of each are.
Crockford explains the problem plainly. Other C-based languages use class inheritance (Crockford calls this classical inheritance). Javascript, on the other hand, is the only popular language that uses prototype inheritance, which does not have classes. However, the syntax which Javascript uses to create object is Java-like (Crockford calls this pseudo-classical syntax). It's confusing, because it keeps you in a class-based frame of mind while working in a language that has no concept of classes.
Clarifying what's going on with the object model is the best part of this book. Crockford also explains other parts of Javascript that can be problematic and the techniques that he prefers for handling them. I don't necessarily agree with all of them, but the important thing is that he explains his reasoning.
To effectively learn Javascript, I recommend that you buy 1) a book that covers the details of the language and can be used as a reference (e.g. Javascript, the Definitive Guide) and 2) Crockford's book. Advanced programmers might also enjoy Pro Javascript Design Patterns, which shows a number of ways to combine Javascript with some of the GoF patterns. I would avoid any cookbook style books on Javascript, because you're better off using YUI, JQuery or one of the other Javascript libraries than writing your own drag-and-drops, calendars, etc.
There are a series of Yahoo! videos by Crockford that mirror the material in this book and can be found as podcasts under YUI Theater. They contain nearly all of the material in the book and probably a little more. Those videos are:
- Douglas Crockford/An Inconvenient API: The Theory of the DOM (3 parts)
- Douglas Crockford/The JavaScript Programming Language (4 parts)
- Douglas Crockford/Advanced JavaScript (3 parts)
- Douglas Crockford/Javascript The Good Parts
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