Javascript The Definitive Guide JavaScript: The Definitive Guide 6th edition: Activate Your Web Pages review

Overview

I wanted to learn JavaScript in depth not because I liked it, but because of it’s pervasiveness.

Douglas Crockford made a convincing case about the fact that JavaScript needs to be taken seriously.

Reading The Good Parts is not enough in my opinion, it seems like a very nice subset of the language you can use for your own applications but in the wild, when you have to modify existing code you might not have the option and you can actually encounter much much more.

At a whopping 1078+ pages, the book aims to cover everything JavaScript, and it mostly does.

First section

In the first section, the whole syntax is covered in much details along with examples and techniques on how to use each parts of the language.

Things are clearly expressed in a very logical order. I think this is one of the perks you get from reading an actual book instead of putting together pieces of tutorials and from posts on stackoverflow.

The author also demonstrates how there are several ways to accomplish the same thing using the language’s rich syntax.

Second section

The second part is about client side JavaScript, so pretty much everything that runs in the browser.

Outside of the DOM api, It covers the inevitable AJAX requests alongside with all the new bells and whistles of the HTML5 APIs.

This section of the book also helps developers deal with different browsers by writing pure JavaScript without the use of a third party libraries like JQuery that tries to diminish those differences, it doesn’t try to hide anything from you.

Third and fourth section

These sections aim to be a reference, it’s just exhaustive documentation about every type of built in objects and functions that is organized in a coherent manner both for the core language and the client side APIs.

Verdict

Overall, this book dramatically changed my view about JavaScript and I know longer perceive it as a toy language to switch images on hover but as a tool to build all kinds of applications.

There’s brief coverage of server side JavaScript but I suspect that the author didn’t expect it to become such a huge thing at the time he was writing the book or it was simply too late, which is a shame.

Learning JavaScript online can be daunting, there’s a lot of bad information out there, there are a few exceptions like the Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) which produces quality documentation on both the core language and the web APIs but overall, this book is totally worth buying for reading cover and cover and keeping as a reference.