How JavaScript Works

Douglas Crockford

Oct 2018 · Virgule-Solidus

About this ebook

Douglas Crockford starts by looking at the fundamentals: names, numbers, booleans, characters, and bottom values. JavaScript’s number type is shown to be faulty and limiting, but then Crockford shows how to repair those problems. He then moves on to data structures and functions, exploring the underlying mechanisms and then uses higher order functions to achieve class-free object oriented programming. The book also looks at eventual programming, testing, and purity, all the while looking at the requirements of The Next Language. Most of our languages are deeply rooted in the paradigm that produced FORTRAN. Crockford attacks those roots, liberating us to consider the next paradigm.He also presents a strawman language and develops a complete transpiler to implement it. The book is deep, dense, full of code, and has moments when it is intentionally funny. 

Ratings and reviews

Very insightful book, I learned a lot about JS objects/prototypes/inheritance in non OOP language. I enjoyed it, I tolerate the snake_case which is anti standard in JS world. I get the idea of using new words (just to show why the new paradigms are hard to shift, when if they are better), but I don't like the concept of copy pasting whole library code.

nice