JavaScript: The Good Parts | 
 enlarge | Author: Douglas Crockford
Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Category: Book
List Price: $29.99
Buy New: $19.77
You Save: $10.22 (34%)
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Rating:  18 reviews
Sales Rank: 3344
Format: Illustrated
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 170
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 7 x 0.5
ISBN: 0596517742
Dewey Decimal Number: 005.133
EAN: 9780596517748
ASIN: 0596517742
Publication Date: May 15, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: All orders ship same business day via standard shipping (USPS Media Mail) if received by 1 PM CST.
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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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| Customer Reviews: Read 13 more reviews...
 A great introduction to JavaScript August 25, 2008
I purchased this book because I needed to learn JavaScript for a specific project I was given.
JavaScript: The Good Parts is great at describing the great features in JavaScript and what 'features' aren't worth the pain they'll put you through. This book is not a JavaScript reference book.
It provides a framework for building JavaScript applications that avoid common problems. The author describes avoiding problems with global variables (by wrapping them in an object or function), inheritance, and other small but important pitfalls.
I'm definately satisfied with the purchase. My biggest wish is that it was longer and more in-depth, as it's obvious the author has a lot more great JavaScript advice to impart.
 The book itself has its good and bad parts August 24, 2008
I bought this book after reading a lot of articles by Douglas Crockford. While the book has very interesting parts and explain in depth things that you take for granted it also has some non-interesting (chapter 8: around 15 pages of "standard methods in standard types" including string.charAt, string.concat, and a lot more).
While I liked the book, I think it was 'filled' with this juiceless chapter because it was already too short (around 145 pages).
I think reading Douglas online is a better deal! See: http://www.crockford.com/
At Long Last, A Serious Javascript Book August 18, 2008
For about as long as it's been about, Javascript has endured a plague of poorly written and presented books. "A Million and One Ways to Write a Rollover." Many books will treat writing a function as an advanced move. It is left as an exercise for the reader how to manage ones code when the scale surpasses the trivial.
Douglas Crockford, who works at Yahoo, is unable to leave these questions in the realm of the intellectual, and he is in growing company. The era of large Javascript applications is upon us. By large, I mean applications that are mostly javascript, rather than HTML documents with a splash of code. This is more than mere AJAX. This is true application development, and with the scale must come application scale rigor.
It is to the problems of serious application developers that Crockford addresses the book. This is *not* an introductory book. It is generally assumed that the reader knows what the building blocks are.
Instead, Crockford focuses on issues such as organization, error avoidance, and writing code touched by many developers.
More importantly, Crockford expresses opinions. Technology as a field is never short on opinion, but technology books are a wasteland. Good luck finding a volume that spends much time at all criticizing its subject matter. Crockford pulls no punches. If he doesn't care for a given design decision, he says as much. It is, in a word, refreshing. Would that more books offered such candor.
Even if you disagree with Crockford's answers, the exercise of working through his arguments will teach you to ask better questions.
In exchange, you will learn about some of the more powerful but under-used aspects of Javascript, such as closures and first class functions. Furthermore, Crockford's detailed descriptions will give you clearer insight into exactly how the language really works.
In sum, Javascript: The Good Parts is the sort of book that can move you to the next level in your javascript development. Thank the gods the age of platonic, useless JS books is behind us.
Not a beginner's book, but August 13, 2008
This is not a book for non-programmers or people new to the field. It is a very dense yet approachable review of the very succinct and elegant language inside of what commonly is thought of as JavaScript. Highly recommended if you have previously thought negative things about JavaScript and want to improve you JavaScript skills, especially for those who favor elegant code.
Excellent Resource for JavaScript July 20, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
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.
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