Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja [Anglais] [Broché]

Resig's earlier effort "Pro JavaScript Techniques" was a good read for its time but got spread thin by getting engrossed in the details of normalizing the DOM API which is something I already had quirksmode.org for as my go-to and that subject is now increasingly less complicated the closer you get to ditching IE8 support.

This is in my experience, the first book to really properly focus on all of the stuff that comes together to really make JavaScript unique and powerful as a language, which has in the past been an understanding you could really only come to by tinkering with JS and reading/borrowing from generous web contributions from Resig, (maybe) Crockford, and IMO, JS-superstar whose name is not sung enough (not for a lack of trying by Resig among others) Dean Edwards whose background in Scheme helped him help the rest of us understand JS for the true complexity-reducing and normalizing beast that it is.

JS didn't come out on top as the only client-side browser option worth pursuing by accident and the view-point that we're "stuck" with it is one that should hopefully be hastily remedied by reading about and understanding what a marvel JS really is when you stop blaming it for Microsoft's tomfoolery and get over the fact that Eich wrote the original version in ten days. That was 17 years ago. JS has evolved constantly since then and hasn't spread to the server, OS, and become the ultimate pan-mobile solution by accident either.

My general sense of the writing is that Resig as always is good at distilling the seemingly complex into bite sized pieces while Bear makes them go down much more easily.

On the "how to use this book" front I'd say keep browsing skimming David Flanagan's "Definitive Guide" to see what all your ingredients are but read this if you're interested in becoming a master chef. If you're intermediate level at JS or heavily experienced in another language to the point where you can compare its mechanics to other languages, this book's probably a good fit.

My only real gripe is (I assume) Resig's with-whiches, from-whiches and in-whiches, which I find semi-painful to read but this is a very minor thing.

Oh and it also took 'em long enough.

:P

This book is a must-have for any serious js coder. It's almost guaranteed that you'll learn new tricks from this book. But more importantly your knowledge of the language will dramatically expand.

Bringing in a 'traditional' c/c++ background, js has been a 'pain' for me to deal with. I've been reading a few js books, tons of blogs and tuts, but very few expose the true nature of the language in a simple and pragmatic manner (way too many contrived examples out there, leading to greater confusion.) The kind of knowledge that keeps you from aiming at your foot... This book is it! I've been reading some of the chapters over and over to gain a deeper understanding of js. I then reviewed some of my previous code and realized that... shoot! I was gonna be limping soon.

Packed with information with an easy-read style, this book is already becoming a 'classic' for me. While not for beginners, if you're a programmer and learning js, I'd recommend you go through this book as you go. Most other js books focus on the syntax and usage but not so much on the language intricacies. For one, I tend to learn a language better if I also understand how it works.

I know I'm mixing my ethnic metaphors, but this book will help you get to ninjahood, guruhood, or whatever other hood you desire to attain. I am not an inexperienced coder: I have 30 years of experience in coding, including 17 years of java and probably 5 doing semi-serious JavaScript. Still, this book opened my eyes to so many things about JavaScript. For example: I knew about functions and I knew about closures, but the exact relationship between functions, objects, and closures had always eluded me. Knowing what you are doing when you say "new Function()". So many other things.

Face it: most of us look at JavaScript as a toy language. But that is only because most of the scripts we've seen have been toy scripts. We've never really seen the guts of a serious JavaScript library like jQuery, require.js, or impactJS. Once you do, you start seeing constructs you can hardly fathom coming from a background in conventional programming languages like java. JavaScript is a serious programming language, and one that is deceptively similar in syntax to java, even though it could hardly be further in semantics. Add to that the fact that there are libraries that make JavaScript look object-oriented, you can easily transport your object-oriented lines of thought into your JavaScript programming.

This book really gives you the ins and outs of JavaScript. Within a few pages I was either learning things I had never known about the language, or realizing how things I had seen actually work. What's more, it presents it in a "unit test" environment. I had always doubted how testable JavaScript was, and I must not be alone, because the book starts out talking about unit tests and presents many of the features using a unit test environment to show how they really work. I consider anything that gets us to write more automated tests - and I am as guilty as any - a good thing.

I highly recommend this book.