“JavaScript: The Good Parts” is the book I’ve read too late.

I understand that reading a book on JavaScript is not required as there are zillions of free tutorials, StackOverflow, and online documentation.

But because, JS is the language so popular and where it is so easy to start without reading anything, this is how most of developers start. This ends up in painful discoveries, gotchas that took ages to come to and production bugs no one knows how to reproduce.

I, actually, had a half year formal educational course on JavaScript. Unfortunately, I didn’t take it seriously. Code looked similar to C++, so I wrote few functions here and there and it was working.

Earlier this year I went to a conference where Douglas Crockford had a key note. I decided, I’ve got to read his book on JS.

Review

“JavaScript: The Good Parts“ is a quite short book. You can manage to read it in a full day, even with JS Bin open for trying things out. I’ve read it in two sessions like that.

I think if Douglas had only left the good parts of his book then it would be a really great even shorter book on JS.

Most of the book are good parts. I really liked explanations behind certain language behaviour and design decisions. Especially, I liked Appendixes A “Awful Parts” and B “Bad Parts”

In my own opinion, not so good parts are: pointless Shakespeare quotes at the beginning of chapters, redundant code in examples like a loop for creating cat doing ‘r-r-r-r’, few places where something non-JS specific is explained like RegEx, few places where something self-centric was mentioned like “Beautiful Features” chapter.

Conclusion

It is a really good book, but if you have few years of experience in JS and some more in other languages you will find very little to learn from the book.

If you are going to read any book on JavaScript at all, this one definitely has to be in you priority list.