“Programming is difficult business,” says Douglas Crockford in the opening chapter. “It should never be undertaken in ignorance.” It dawns on me as I read on, I have been struggling with JavaScript for years in ignorance.
JavaScript is not like other languages, it requires a different programming paradigm. I knew of JavaScript’s prototypal and functional nature, but I hadn’t ever grasped the power of lexical scoping, closure and object literals covered here.
Another common struggle with JavaScript is its faults. “Quality was not a motivating concern in the design, implementation, or standardisation of JavaScript,” says Crockford. “That puts a greater burden on the users of the language to resist the language’s weaknesses.”
This book describes a subset of JavaScript that we can use safely and that keeps its elegance, flexibility and highly expressive power.
And there is more: A brief reference to standard JavaScript methods, a chapter on Style that makes the case for well written code, a detailed examination of Regular Expressions that made my head hurt, diagrammatic documentation of JavaScript grammar and syntax, and invaluable references to JSLint (a code quality tool) and JSON (the data interchange format).
All of this in 176 pages. I became a fan of Douglas Crockford’s work after watching his excellent “ Crockford on JavaScript” lecture series online. Five lectures changed the way I think about JavaScript. I was delighted to receive a free copy of JavaScript: The Good Parts as part of the O’Reilly Blogger Review Program and to have the opportunity to explore this topic further and put my thoughts together.
