Effective JavaScript

David Herman

Nov 2012 · Addison-Wesley

About this ebook

“It’s uncommon to have a programming language wonk who can speak in such comfortable and friendly language as David does. His walk through the syntax and semantics of JavaScript is both charming and hugely insightful; reminders of gotchas complement realistic use cases, paced at a comfortable curve. You’ll find when you finish the book that you’ve gained a strong and comprehensive sense of mastery.”

—Paul Irish, developer advocate, Google Chrome

“This is not a book for those looking for shortcuts; rather it is hard-won experience distilled into a guided tour. It’s one of the few books on JS that I’ll recommend without hesitation.”

—Alex Russell, TC39 member, software engineer, Google

In order to truly master JavaScript, you need to learn how to work effectively with the language’s flexible, expressive features and how to avoid its pitfalls. No matter how long you’ve been writing JavaScript code, Effective JavaScript will help deepen your understanding of this powerful language, so you can build more predictable, reliable, and maintainable programs.

Author David Herman, with his years of experience on Ecma’s JavaScript standardization committee, illuminates the language’s inner workings as never before—helping you take full advantage of JavaScript’s expressiveness. Reflecting the latest versions of the JavaScript standard, the book offers well-proven techniques and best practices you’ll rely on for years to come.

Effective JavaScript is organized around 68 proven approaches for writing better JavaScript, backed by concrete examples. You’ll learn how to choose the right programming style for each project, manage unanticipated problems, and work more successfully with every facet of JavaScript programming from data structures to concurrency. Key features include

• Better ways to use prototype-based object-oriented programming
• Subtleties and solutions for working with arrays and dictionary objects
• Precise and practical explanations of JavaScript’s functions and variable scoping semantics
• Useful JavaScript programming patterns and idioms, such as options objects and method chaining
• In-depth guidance on using JavaScript’s unique “run-to-completion” approach to concurrency

Ratings and reviews

I've come back to this book a few times, reading only a third way through and putting it down perplexed and annoyed. And then finally after many months away from any JavaScript book and studying only by doing, I finally understand some of the code examples that once stumped me. This book doesn't explain the low level details of the code examples, they are instead written in a way that *should just make sense. This at first really annoyed me, but now I really enjoy figuring out how they work. The function names and arguments are named with meaning, so someone with an intermediate knowledge of programming and with any understanding of JavaScript will be able to understand.

About the author

David Herman is a principal researcher at Mozilla Research. He holds a BA in computer science from Grinnell College, and an MS and PhD in computer science from Northeastern University. David serves on Ecma TC39, the committee responsible for the standardization of JavaScript.