JavaScript: The Good Parts - short review

Considering that JavaScript: The Good Parts is only 124 pages it took me a lot of attempts to work my way through it. A combination of the authors attitude and the dry presentation put me off within the first three chapters every time i tried to read the book.

However a side project I was helping out on needed some JavaScript reviewed and considering how little of the language I knew I forced myself to work through the book and I’m glad I did - despite its short comings it’s an excellent introduction to the language for programmers with a couple of other languages under their belt. The main parts of the language, such as syntax railroad diagrams, objects, inheritance and regular expressions are covered in a very basic, but to the point style with some excellent little code snippets. The examples in this book help you think of the language itself as mutable and just another tool to bend to your needs.

Once I accepted the authors style I liked the book. It would have been better with a little less repetition and maybe even as a pocket reference but it’s an excellent book on JavaScript none the less. Score

• 7/10

Note - when trying the samples, and experimenting with the language in general, I used the Mozilla Rhino JavaScript interpreter. It was nice to have a non-web playground for getting to grips with the language without needing to work around the idiosyncrasies that come with web browsers.