Most programming languages contain good and bad parts, but JavaScript has more than its share of the bad, having been developed and released in a hurry before it could be refined. This authoritative book scrapes away these bad features to reveal a subset of JavaScript that's more reliable, readable, and maintainable than the language as a whole-a subset you can use to create truly extensible and efficient code. Considered the JavaScript expert by many people in the development community, author Douglas Crockford identifies the abundance of good ideas that make JavaScript an outstanding object-oriented programming language-ideas such as functions, loose typing, dynamic objects, and an expressive object literal notation. Unfortunately, these good ideas are mixed in with bad and downright awful ideas, like a programming model based on global variables. When Java applets failed, JavaScript became the language of the Web by default, making its popularity almost completely independent of its qualities as a programming language. In JavaScript: The Good Parts, Crockford finally digs through the steaming pile of good intentions and blunders to give you a detailed look at all the genuinely elegant parts of JavaScript, including:

• Syntax

• Objects

• Functions

• Inheritance

• Arrays

• Regular expressions

• Methods

• Style

• Beautiful features

The real beauty? As you move ahead with the subset of JavaScript that this book presents, you'll also sidestep the need to unlearn all the bad parts. Of course, if you want to find out more about the bad parts and how to use them badly, simply consult any other JavaScript book. With JavaScript: The Good Parts, you'll discover a beautiful, elegant, lightweight and highly expressive language that lets you create effective code, whether you're managing object libraries or just trying to get Ajax to run fast. If you develop sites or applications for the Web, this book is an absolute must.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 52 Ratings

Material is good, but author attitude is not - 2009-10-27
Reviewer Rating:
I'm new to javascript and wanted a book just to get me started. I figured this book was as good of a starting point as any.

The material is good, but not always explained very well.

I gave the book only 3 stars because I found the author's blatant bitterness and self-righteousness to be distracting.

Repetitive, opinionated, and cranky - 2009-10-12
Reviewer Rating:
Short but repetitious. A bad combination. Majorly disappointed by this one.

First of all, it's not really a JavaScript book - much of the advice offered is very generic. Like YOU MUST USE PARENTHESES AROUND CONDITIONAL BODIES. Repeated three times. And the evils of ++ and -- operators. The author forbids these even in for loops. Huh?

I don't care about the code for solving the Towers of Hanoi. I want to learn more about JavaScript! Unfortunately the descriptions of prototypes, functions, inheritance, in here are so terse that I have to spend far longer than is necessary in rereading them.

The "railway" diagrams are pure filler. Page after page. Come on, NOBODY reads these.

And what have regexps got to do with JavaScript per se? Nothing... so why do we need a whole chapter on them?

For that matter, why does Yahoo! NEED a "Chief JavaScript Architect"? Bet Google doesn't have one.

JavaScript only survived the first year of its life because Applets were so obviously useless. It only survived its childhood because teenage hackers liked its lack of a type system and its simple way of doing simple things (badly); and it is only alive today because AJAX came along. I wanted this book to change my mind about how awful the language is. It didn't. Instead I got the semi-random ramblings of someone who's invented some fairly trivial tool - JSLint - and thinks it solves everyone's problems. Well, it doesn't. My IDE does a better job these days.

Sound advice on coding to Javascript's strengths rather than fighting them - 2009-10-07
Reviewer Rating:
This book is another in the series of books lately reclaiming Javascript as a powerful language that hasn't gotten it's due (see Stefanov's book for another good example). Crockford makes a great case for Javascript not needing to please the crowd of class based languages and instead using it's prototype functional roots to their max to achieve similar ends (code reuse, inheritance, private data..). His examples showing how to do class styled coding in javascript (though using prototypes in the inside, as that what the language has to offer) followed by a more pure object to object prototyping really sends the point across in comparing elegance and benefits of the latter over the former within Javascript's rules.

I found chapter 5 on the inheritance techniques to be way harder than the other chapters in the book. But after digesting some of it, I proceeded on to the next chapters. They did not build on it so much as they were covering other domains of the language, so it's not a show stopper to understand the rest of what crockford is after to show you which are of course "the good parts" in the other domains (regular expressions, built in objects...). I return to the fifth chapter periodically to further understand everything that's going on there and pick up something else each time.

It was also nice to have the "avoid this" opinion sections entitled "awful parts" and "bad parts". While some may be disputable, it's good to get a heavyweight's reasons on why to avoid them if possible.

The code is usually light and nicely explained. The errata in the oreilly site patch up the few oopsies here and there. I feel definitely more energized to write prototype based Javascript and learn some Ajax libraries without being afraid to peak in at their source if need be now and then.

Short and to the point! - 2009-07-22
Reviewer Rating:
No messing with the DOM in this book! Here you learn the core syntax of Javascript in an easy to read way, while staying away from the pitfalls of the language.

I read it in a matter of two days, and I really feel more confident about my Javascript with this knowledge under my belt.

Combine this with one of the books on jQuery and you could be a rockstar in no time at all!

Consider one (or several) of these books:
Learning jQuery 1.3
jQuery in Action
jQuery UI 1.6: The User Interface Library for jQuery

Fantastic Best Practice Guide - 2009-07-02
Reviewer Rating:
David Flanagan's "Javascript: The Definitive Guide" has long been an essential resource. This book is the missing chapter from the definitive guide, a short best practices guide that really can help you take your Javascript programming to another level.

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