Book Review: Javascript: The good parts

27 Feb 2015

After reading Douglas Crockford chapter on Coders at Work (and his criticism on Javascript) and being recommended to read it by several friends, I got eager to read his book about Javascript: Javascript: The good parts. So, I spent last carnival holiday to read it.

I think the main proposal of this book is to not get really deep on all Javascript features, but to overview good features of the language (and also the most common pitfalls). It could also serve as a introduction to Javascript to someone that knows his way around programming (i.e. knows what a for, a while and a switch means), as it briefly covers the Javascript syntax (but does not goes deep on it). It also covers arrays, objects, regular expressions and how to deal with exceptions.

Object oriented Javascript

As Javascript is normally used for small manipulation of pages (like filling a cities select input through AJAX after selecting a state), it can be written as a procedural script. But as things evolve, more and more code like this end up being added, and like a snowball you Javascript code end up becaming a mess and every time you have to touch it, you start considering rewriting it.

On being a Object Oriented language, it is possible to split responsabilities in objects and use important concepts of the Object Oriented world like encapsulation and inheritance. The book also gives a good overview on how prototypes work and how to use them to create objects based on other objects.

Functions as objects

One of the greatest features of Javascript is that functions are objects (just like a number, a string or an array), so it is possible to store functions on a variable, pass them as an argument or make functions return functions. If you know how to listen to events, you probably did this by adding a function to be executed when an event is triggered.

The book explains the benefits of this property: cascading, currying, how to create a memoization mechanism, and callbacks. It also explains important concepts on functions: dealing with an arbitrary number of arguments, closures and how scopes in JS work.

Language downsides and JSLint

This chapters are on the appendix, but I think they deserve a mention as they explain why caring for good code in JavaScript is important (and how JSLint you can help you with this).

JavaScript has a lot of pitfalls: a naive a = 1 expression, when a was not declared turns a it into a global variable, the typeof behaviour for NaN is strange (who would think that typeof NaN is Number), the weak-typing misleadings ('1' + 1 being '11') and the evil == that does type coercion to both sides of the expression and end up doing nasty things like evaluation to true '0' == false and 0 == false. The book goes through all these things and explains the problems with them.

Fortunately, there is a tool (created by the author) to catch this problems before your code goes to production: JSLint . You can use this tool to check for some traps in your Javascript code (and you can also specify when you want to do some things in purpose, so JSLint will not complain about them). The book has an appendix that explains the options on JSLint.

API Documentation

One part that I think could be improved on this book is the API documentation or a big method overview . I think book pages are not the right place for an API documentation, as it is really boring to read and although you may learn a thing or another, the biggest part of it you end up reading and forgetting a few days later.

There is a chapter that goes through small set of methods of all the standard types: Strings, Arrays, Numbers, Regexps etc. It is really well written and contains good examples but I don’t think a book telling the language good parts should do a method overview.

Conclusion

This book is a must-read if you touch any JavaScript code, as it is normally easy to write JS code, but difficult to write good quality Javascript code due to its inumerous traps and OO and function features of the that are not known to a major extent of the developer community. Even if you consider yourself fluent in JavaScript and write it for a living, you will for sure learn a new trick or something new on the language by reading this book.

The author wrote an article about how JavaScript is misunderstood, that is also worth reading if you are not a big JS fan.