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JavaScript: The Good Parts | 
 enlarge | Author: Douglas Crockford
Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Category: Book
List Price: $29.99
Buy New: $17.12
You Save: $12.87 (43%)
New (25) Used (4) from $17.09
Rating:  16 reviews
Sales Rank: 2286
Format: Illustrated
Media: Paperback
Pages: 170
Number Of Items: 1
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 11 more reviews...
 At Long Last, A Serious Javascript Book August 18, 2008
Andre M. Behrens (New York, NY USA)
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
Yann Ramin
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
Steve B. Meinel
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.
A Great JavaScript Book for Everybody July 7, 2008
Frank Stepanski (Philadelphia)
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
This is the first book by Douglas Crockford a Senior Software Archtitect at Yahoo. He is widely known as one of the most knowledgeable on JavaScript apart from the creater of JavaScript (Brendan Eich). Douglas Crockford is the creator of JSON and has written many articles and presentations on JavaScript-related topics in web development.
His book JavaScript: the Good Parts, is a short (145 pages including Appendix) but is very useful for the person who wants to expand his/her JavaScript skills and knowledge. It reviews the basics of the language in the first two chapters and then focus on intermediate and advanced topics such as objects, inheritance, arrays, and methods.
The appendix categorizes the "bad" parts of JavaScript that are not good programming syntax and should be avoided such as global variables, scope, eval function, with statement, undefined variables and so forth.
I really like how Douglas Crockford gives you everything you need in this book that is relevant to how modern developers using JavaScript program and helping you understand it easily and quickly. No long-winded explanations or extra "filler" just to make the book longer. He is right to the point and explains it in a coherent, understandable way no matter what your "technical" level is.
This is a very useful book for the client-side developer who wants either a great reference book or somebody who wants to take their skills to the next level using JavaScript.
A must buy!
 some value - because it's cheap July 7, 2008
MV (Costa Mesa, CA United States)
1 out of 20 found this review helpful
it's amazing that many great people don't know how to teach...somebody who loves this language so much to write so little and not explaining and providing examples......
The same thing you could find online.....
Don't take me wrong, you will learn a thing or two, but that's not the point.
So called diagrams or flow, whatever they are, they are totally useless.
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