Eloquent Javascript by Marijn Haverbeke

What a lovely title for a book! I wanted to read a book about the proper way to write Javascript but I couldn't wait any longer for John Resig's Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja which isn't out in print yet (also a great title by the way).

Eloquent Javascript begins very lightly with the basics of Javascript programming. Variables, scope, data structures and control flow. To be perfectly honest I didn't read it very carefully but I believe I did pick up a thing or two at least. The chapter on error handling was useful but the really interesting chapters were "Functional Programming" and "Object-Oriented Programming". What I love about Marijn's style of writing is that he starts very very simple and builds up the code to be better and better. Not based on what you can do but instead why you should do it. As you go along you can then immediately snap up what the benefits are for yourself. Sometimes it's brevity and sometimes it's for faster performance. My only criticism if I'm allowed is that the jargon is quite a lot keep up with. Especially around "constructors" and "prototypes" which is sometimes easy to forget (especially if you're from another language where these things mean different things).

I'm not great at it but I already knew how to write modules and "classes" so ultimately there wasn't a whole lot to take away from it to be honest. Some tricks such as the inheritance function which Marijn introduced was neat and that might be something I'll copy. Nevertheless, this book showed and educated me in why we do things as modules and stuff which I genuinely appreciated.

Thanks for a great book Marijn! Keep up the good work!