Speaking JavaScript

by rauschma • 12 years ago

204 48 12 years ago

Flimm• 12 years ago

This book deliberately omits talking about Javascript in the browser, but the only reason I want to study Javascript is for its use in a browser context!

rauschma4• 12 years ago

It’s a matter of deliberate focus! If you are interested in browser stuff, you can either combine Speaking JS with the content on MDN [1] or buy a different book. I like the books by Nicholas Zakas and “JavaScript: The Definitive Guide”.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/

dragonwriter• 12 years ago

There's no shortage of books about JavaScript in a browser context. There's fewer books on JavaScript that don't fairly exclusively focus on that context.

hawkharris• 12 years ago

I never knew that NaN is not strictly equal to itself in JavaScript (so NaN === NaN => false). Very interesting.

memming• 12 years ago

I would be surprised if it were. All languages I know says NaN == NaN is false.

acjohnson55• 12 years ago

That's the canonical way to check for NaN, in fact.

chewxy3• 12 years ago

No. Use isNaN() instead. Or if you have ES6 support, Number.isNaN() is much better an implementation than window.isNaN()

adamman• 12 years ago

It makes sense. Just because both things are not something does not mean they are the same.

chewxy3• 12 years ago

The reason is simple:

"hello" is Not a Number. "world" is Not a Number.

(Number)"hello" == (Number)"world" returns false.

EDIT: Another reason why this is the case is because IEEE mandates it to be. All numbers in JS are 64 bit floating point numbers. This allows for a crazy amount of NaNs (and oh the fun stuff you can do with that). To be sane, NaNs are not the same when comparing them (there is a lot more subtlety in that - comparing quiet and signalling NaNs, and so on and so forth)

dalore• 12 years ago

if a !== a then a is NaN

badman_ting• 12 years ago

This makes it easy to test for NaN! It's the only value for which this is true. (And the built-in isNaN() function has misleading behavior.)

klibertp2• 12 years ago

It's actually part of some cryptic and ancient standard and is common for nearly all languages nowadays. I never cared about it very much, but here's the post on NaN semantics from someone who apparently designed the standard:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1565164/what-is-the-ratio...

munificent• 12 years ago

cryptic and ancient standard

Cryptic and ancient?! IEEE 754 is the behavior implemented by the chip in the computer you're using to browser HN with right now.

hansy• 12 years ago

This reminds me of a hilarious Destroy All Software screencast about oddities in certain programming languages: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat

hoers2• 12 years ago

Anybody else getting 404s?

petercooper• 12 years ago

I saw some tweets yesterday from which I inferred there have been some DNS propagation issues. I notice the IP is an S3 one so I tried.. http://s3.amazonaws.com/speakingjs.com/es5/index.html and it seems to work, so might be a good temporary workaround.

hoers2• 12 years ago

thanks!

caniscrator2• 12 years ago

'Eloquent Javascript' (http://eloquentjavascript.net/) and 'Learning JavaScript Design Patterns' (http://addyosmani.com/resources/essentialjsdesignpatterns/bo...) are the best resources so far.

ritchiea4• 12 years ago

I second Eloquent Javascript. It's the book I recommend to JS beginners. Secrets of the Javascript Ninja by John Resig & Bear Bibealt is another good one once you get past the terrible title.

I will checkout Learning Javascript Design Patterns on your recommendation. I bookmarked that book a while ago but forgot to return and give it a read.

caniscrator2• 12 years ago

Yes about Javascript Ninja, you are quite right. No doubt, its one's best companion for getting firm grip on cross-browser compatibility issues.

eddd• 12 years ago

I hate books with contents like: Variables and Assignment Values, Booleans, Numbers, Operators, Strings,Statements, Functios, Exception Handling, Strict Mode, Variable Scoping and losures, Objects and Constructors, Arrays etc... there are milions books like that. I require from book to introduce me into new language in a manner where i don't have to suffer due to going throught dry facts and definitions. Give me pure examples. I want to create something useful during lecture of book about programming.

mathias• 12 years ago

If you’d take the time to read the free online copy (which OP links to) you’d see that there are plenty of “pure examples” in the book. In fact, there’s a code example for every two paragraphs of text, or so.

chewxy3• 12 years ago

Give Underhanded JavaScript a try then. It teaches you how to be an arsehole JS developer :P - published today too (http://leanpub.com/underhandedjavascript/c/NackerHews)

The book is laid out by logical topics (on how to purposely write bad/underhanded code, followed by explanation on why/how they work) instead of keywords (such as IIFEs, automatic semicolon insertion, function calls etc)

disclaimer: I wrote it

EDIT: I skimmed through Speaking JavaScript. It's a bloody good book, much better than mine. You probably should read that

One more EDIT:

Since there was another thread which I gave a coupon for HNers, here's the link:

http://leanpub.com/underhandedjavascript/c/NackerHews

frozenport• 12 years ago

This book is too expensive. I would only buy it if I saw a physical copy and judged a few pages funny.

ritchiea4• 12 years ago

Agreed. Books that focus on teaching syntax and common use cases really fall flat for me. The best programming books teach you how to think in the syntax of the language. Eloquent Javascript [1] does a good job of that and is also free.

The best programming book at teaching a practical contemporary language in depth while teaching you to think with it is Metaprogramming Ruby. That's a great read for anyone considering writing a book to teach a programming language. And the best book I've ever read on thinking about programming comprehensively is SICP. Which again, I would recommend reading at least half of if you are going to write a book teaching a language.

1. http://eloquentjavascript.net/

blumkvist2• 12 years ago

Hey, I stumbled across a post of the author of eloquentjavascript that he's crowdfunding second edition of the book. My question is - how current is the first edition? Is it suitable to teach me JS, considering it's quite old? I'm not a good programmer. I know a bit of python, mainly for statistical tasks and some automation/scraping.

rauschma4• 12 years ago

Even though it is about Scheme, the insights in SICP are invaluable for JavaScript programmers (the way I explain and visualize closures and environments are inspired by it). It’s one of the best programming books I’ve ever read.

Give my book a chance, it is complementary to both SICP and Eloquent JavaScript.

straws• 12 years ago

You might like Javascript Allonge, a lot

https://leanpub.com/javascript-allonge/read

rauschma4• 12 years ago

Don’t judge a book by its TOC! I’d love to get your opinion once you have read or at least skimmed, say, chapter 1: http://speakingjs.com/es5/ch01.html

jw2013• 12 years ago

john resig- secrets of javascript ninja

absolutely the best

klibertp2• 12 years ago

I hate books with contents like that too - I've read about those things many times already and unless the language I'm currently learning really does something interesting in one of those areas reading whole paragraphs of text on them is just a waste of time. I'm recently learning Forth, and I really do appreciate more detailed explanations, because holy cow, that's some really crazy shit going on :) However, for languages and technologies closer to mainstream - or just similar to what I already know - I use these web sites for an intro:

http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Rosetta_Code

http://learnxinyminutes.com/

http://hyperpolyglot.org/

And then go straight to the most advanced books I can find. It saves me a lot of time and it's more fun than following yet another book structured in exactly the same way, with pages and pages of text about minor syntactical differences and rare interesting things buried deep inside the book.

stewbrew• 12 years ago

I humbly disagree. Especially in the case of JavaScript it's a good idea to review JavaScript's specific perspective on functions and object but also variable scope. I personally found "JavaScript Enlightment" quite interesting in this respect.

jrs99• 12 years ago

I agree. I enjoy weird quirky books that actually have a narrative and you build projects and learn the syntax while you are doing more interesting stuff.

However, I've read many books with tables of contents that look like that, yet they were actually pleasant to read and much more interesting than their contents implied.

pietro• 12 years ago

Personally, I love learning from books like this one and consider tutorial-style books a complete waste of my time. It's a matter of learning style, and the differences are fairly well understood. Look up deductive vs inductive teaching.

Teachers try to use both methods, but book authors don't have to. Readers are free to learn from any book that suits them.

gtirloni• 12 years ago

Is it possible the author is getting more revenue from that little ad on the right side then from actual sales?

Is it common for O'Reilly authors to release their books this way?

rauschma4• 12 years ago

It’s an experiment of mine (but I am aware of at least one more O’Reilly book that has been published this way). I’m hoping that it’s win-win: The public version lets people share and link to what they have read (click on a title to create a link to it). And it allows them to figure out whether the book is for them. But I believe that it will also help sell books.

ptwobrussell• 12 years ago

I strongly considered the approach of releasing the contents of my recent book online with Mining the Social Web 2E [1] but instead decided to pursue what I felt was a standard OSS model: release a really high quality version of the source code that's optimized for easy learning in IPython Notebook format (optionally packaged as a turn-key VM) on GitHub [2] with the book being a form of "premium support" for the codebase if people want to learn more or dig deeper. I touch on all of this somewhat in the book's blog's "book as a startup posts" [3], and it seems to be working well so far.

I'm increasingly becoming interested in the prospect of releasing the entire contents of the book (both prose and source code) in IPython Notebook format so that you could read and work in the book seamlessly as "executable paper" like this full-text sampler of Chapter 1 [4] if it were hosted on Wakarii or a similar platform that offers a free tier. It really seems to me that this is the future of tech books: learning platforms with prose and example code integrated seamlessly.

[1] http://amzn.to/GPd59m

[2] https://github.com/ptwobrussell/Mining-the-Social-Web-2nd-Ed...

[3] http://miningthesocialweb.com/category/book-as-a-startup/

[4] http://bit.ly/IW3cbc

camus22• 12 years ago

Recently found this :

http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~cs1101s/sicp/

SICP in Javascript.While the coding style is a little bit old school this should be linked in every javascript book / blog about learning Javascript. This stuff is just awesome.

I would gladly pay 30 bucks for a revised paper back version.

ciclista• 12 years ago

Sweet, looks like something fun to work with this weekend, thanks for sharing!

draegtun• 12 years ago

Also see Higher-Order Javascript by Sean M. Burke which is a "JavaScriptish companion" to Mark-Jason Dominus's Higher-Order Perl book - http://interglacial.com/hoj/

camus22• 12 years ago

thanks for the link.

enen• 12 years ago

I wonder if it's a good idea to read SICP for the first time in a... let's say a language that people have mixed feelings about rather than the original version of the book. I guess nothing wrong with learning Scheme but as a JavaScripter this looks too good.

Speaking JavaScript

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