AMAZON ELOQUENT JAVASCRIPT HOW TO

The only way to truly learn a programming language is to take it for a spin and as Seth Godin likes to put it, “poke the box”. At a svelte 200-ish pages, Eloquent JavaScript covers a lot of ground in less space than many other, lesser books you’ll find cluttering the shelves at your local store. After that, there’s a solid chapter on regular expressions and the book closes with four chapters on the most likely application of JavaScript: web development, from the DOM to browser events to what we once used to refer to as “Ajax”. With those out of the way, he goes on to cover functional programming, then object-oriented programming (most people would do it the other way around, but if you’re not getting into functional programming with JavaScript as soon as possible, you’re missing out on a lot of the power), then modules. After the basics, he presents functions, data structures and then error handling, providing a solid base of knowledge for the reader. Haverbeke introduces the right stuff at the right time. When you need to remember something, you grow a tentacle to hold on to it, or you reattach one of your existing tentacles to a new value. Only the values that the program still has a hold on can be accessed by it. They do not contain values they grasp them – two variables can refer to the same value. You should imagine variables as tentacles, rather than boxes.

AMAZON ELOQUENT JAVASCRIPT HOW TO

And he does so in an informative, entertaining way, as evidenced by this passage on how to think of variables:

I was initially rolling my eyes when I saw the title of the first chapter – Values, Variables and Control Flow – but Haverbeke’s got a gift for presenting things that you’ve seen before, shining a new light on them from an odd angle and giving you a new way of looking at stuff that is so familiar that you hadn’t given it much thought until now. It’s that well written my reading that night sold me on the book. We’ve got a number of dead-tree copies of Eloquent JavaScript floating around Shopify, so I thumbed through one a couple of evenings ago and bought my own shortly afterwards. Nick’s working on a very interesting JavaScript project (which I’ll write about in a future article) and he’s forgotten more about JavaScript than I’m likely to learn, so I give his JavaScript-related suggestions a lot of credence.

Plus, JavaScript!Īn equally important recommendation comes from Shopify’s JavaScript guru, Nick Small, who points anyone who wants to get good at JavaScript to Eloquent JavaScript. This book rekindled my earliest joys of programming. I loved the tutorial-style game-like program development. There’s no greater recommendation than JavaScript creator Brendan Eich’s unsolicited review on Amazon:Ī concise and balanced mix of principles and pragmatics. If you decide to purchase only one JavaScript book, that book should be Marijn Haverbeke’s Eloquent JavaScript.

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