Book of the Week: JavaScript: The Good Parts

31 May 2016

This week, I read JavaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford, because it is hard to call yourself a full stack engineer if you don’t know JavaScript well. This book is great. Not SICP great, but great in the sense that it tells you everything you need to know in a condensed manner. Nobody wakes up and says they want to learn how to program with JavaScript. They try to build a website and need to scratch together some JavaScript to do some interactive stuff. The book is about getting things done rather than teaching you things that you will let you show off how smart you are. Nobody cares how smart you are as long as you are writing code that works. Often being too smart makes it harder for other people to understand what you are doing. The book covers all the annoyances and pitfalls that trip up people. The book is short enough to read in an hour. Should be required reading for anyone working with JavaScript. Prototypical Inheritance Everything in JavaScript is an object. Functions are objects. Since there are no classes, people create pseudoclassical classes with prototypical inheritance as an alternative to functional classes. If you don’t understand what this means, then you should read the book. Purchase JavaScript: The Good Parts from Amazon.com or check it out from your local library.