JavaScript: The Good Parts

A very good introduction to JavaScript. It only deals with the language itself, and doesn't worry about DOM scripting or implementation details and inconsistencies in different browsers; you'll need a different book for that.

The reader of "JavaScript: The Good Parts" by Douglas Crockford will get a very good idea of why JavaScript is considered a runt among programming languages. Crockford does his best to model good programming patterns and style in JavaScript. It is unfortunate and telling that the book is so thin. Crockford neither pulls his jabs at the language nor dumps on it unfairly, but gives a clear rationale for his opinions.

Like JavaScript, the book is more sure of what it is not than of what it really wants to be. Readers should read the preface seriously before going further -- but ignore the contradictory second sentence stating it is for programmers working with JavaScript for the first time. The book will interest language nerds, but it really should be read by intermediate JavaScript programmers who spend too much time debugging code they should never have written.

The short chapters make the book a relatively quick read, despite the somewhat advanced level of the material compared to other JavaScript books. Upon first glance at the size of the book, I was reminded of The Little Schemer (a tutorial on the Scheme programming language). Crockford's writing is easy to read, as if you were collecting thorough notes over a long series of lunch time talks. Incidentally, the structure of the book is unlike "Little Schemer" but Crockford does touch on functional programming techniques.

This book has a strong overtone of frustration with JavaScript. That isn't a criticism of Crockford, but sprinkled throughout the material are the tell-tale signs of what could have been, or should have been, but can never, ever be. It truly gets to a head in Chapter 9, titled "Style", in which 11 paragraphs in three pages start with "I". It is personal for Crockford.

Readers should be aware that there is virtually no error checking in the code. While omitting error checks is a common practice in trade book code samples, Crockford is making a point of illustrating good coding practice. The absence of a disclaimer is odd, but several of Crockford's examples do deal specifically with faulty conditional expressions. Take his warning in the preface to heart again here: "JavaScript: The Good Parts" won't tell you everything you should be doing to write good code.

JavaScript: The Good Parts is not a real reference, but if you do sporadic JavaScript programming it may be a book you will pick up again several times. That's because it is small enough and concise enough to act as a quick reference to the stuff that really is worth using, and some of the parts that really are best avoided.

This is the first book anyone touching JavaScript must read. Learning JavaScript from any other source (book or website) will teach you bad habits that will be difficult to break. Just pretend that JavaScript is the "good" subset that's taught in this book and look up the bad parts as you encounter them in other people's code. Now I've got 1500 lines of JavaScript I have to go back and fix because I didn't read this book two months ago.

Oh, and don't be thrown by other reviewers' complaints that the book is too short. It's just the right size for what it's trying to teach.

I was reading Coders at Work and came to the chapter on Doug Crockford. I was impressed enough to put the book down and order this one. As soon as it arrived I read it from cover to cover (it's short).

This is my first encounter with JavaScript (I am an experienced C, C++, and Objective-C programmer). Crockford's approach, teaching a subset of the language and explaining clearly why you should avoid the rest of it, was exactly what I needed. There's a lot of emphasis on JavaScript's best feature, namely closures or lambda functions, and the explanation of this concept is the clearest that I've read, with plenty of well-made examples. Conversely, I feel the book has saved me a lot of time and frustration by steering me away from the bad features.

Crockford has strong opinions, which may not be to everybody's liking. But this book really does provide the True Clues. Since it is quite brief and compressed, I went looking for a bigger JavaScript book and found Object-Oriented JavaScript: Create scalable, reusable high-quality JavaScript applications and libraries. Its view of JavaScript is fully compatible with Crockford's. Another supplement I recommend is Crockford's video talks at [...]

I love this book. Mr. Crockford covers a ton of very usable information in a relatively small volume. If you are the kind of developer who likes to be spoon-fed popular programming idioms, you might want to look elsewhere. If you want to master the nuts and bolts of JavaScript, this elegantly condensed and filtered version of the ECMAScript specification is probably for you. I would welcome a similar treatment of Python and Ruby. The author's no BS approach is refreshing.