Professional JavaScript for Web Developers 3rd Edition

This is one of those books that you keep withing arm's length and to which you frequently refer when designing software. It is not a tutorial book for learning JavaScript simply because it has too much detail. That detail is the reason this is such a useful reference book -- it contains loads of detailed information on every topics, including implementation issues, behavioral nuances, better ways to use features, alternatives, etc. After over 40 years of active professional software development and multi-year fluency in at least eight languages, I've found a reference book like this for each language. It looks like this will be my "go to" reference for JavaScript.One review complained that there was not coverage of DOM, but there are three chapters (122 pages) dedicated to DOM. Another complained about no inclusion of object-oriented programming in JavaScript, but there is a 44-page chapter solely on Object-Oriented Programming, plus additional o-o material scattered throughout the book. There was a complaint about the incompleteness of the index. Admittedly, I don't yet have months of referencing material in this book, but I have yet to find a topic that wasn't well-covered in its index.I highly recommend Kevin Stokes' November 3, 2012 five-star review -- "Coming from a real language? This book is your best bet.".

There is a line from Lion King where little Simba comments on his Uncle Scar's weirdness. Scar replies "You have no idea." The main point of this review is that Javascript is a really weird contraption, and that this book points this out in a way that is very helpful for programmers coming from more traditional compiled programming languages. I have programmed in C, C++, Java, C# for many years. I have read other books on Javascript which tried to teach by examples. With normal programming languages, this works fine. However, within a few hours with this book I realized that to understand Javascript, you must give up on some basic expectations you may have as a code developer. This was a surprise to me, but crucial to be able to learn Javascript well enough to work on non-trivial projects with existing code. Javascript is simply bizarre. There are many different ways to implement object-oriented patterns which all use different-looking code, and have subtle differences, making it so easy to get bitten by unintended consequences. From this book I learned that there is no one solid way to implement the basic pattern of your code, you must make a choice. If you try to read a Javascript book which teaches by examples, you will be in trouble when you actually start to modify someone else's Javascript code which used a different pattern. This book doesn't just show trivial examples, it methodically goes through how it works in enough detail so you can understand how it is working under the hood. Also, the text has plenty of warnings about buggy implementations and common pitfalls. After you get about 1/4 of the way through it you will be wondering how any Javascript code runs on Internet Explorer at all, since about every other page is another 'this-is-broken-in-IE' warning boxes. The text is written in a very clear style, never glossing over anything. It isn't at all cute or made to be entertaining, just kind of down to business. There is no question I will be using this book nearly every time I have to work on Javascript code. If you are just looking to make a little mouse button handler in a web page, this is probably not the book for you. It does not jump right into little useful examples. If you are coming from a programming background in traditional compiled languages, and you want to know more about Javascript than little tiny scripts, IMHO this book is absolutely necessary. You will never regret purchasing it.

Overall useful for experienced developers of any language. That is to say, if you are a beginner programmer, I would find another book (and language quite frankly). As far as the good, this book seems to cover everything that deals with JavaScript and the browser without bringing in frameworks and libraries. The reason I rate this 4 instead of 5 is because it's organized a bit strange. For example, the author spends a lot of time talking about what variables are, the different types of variables (primitive values and references), and how they are copied. The thing is that there aren't any surprises here, and he could have explained this in about half the space. Additionally, he talks a lot about how scope, variables, and execution context pertain to objects prior to ever explaining what objects are. He then calls out with and try/catch. Then he only explains with, but the example cannot be executed yet because with is a way to assign execution context to a single object. He doesn't explain try/catch for JavaScript at all. Moreover, if you read JavaScript: The Good Parts by Crockford, he explains why with is actually quite ambiguous and will silently create undefined global variables if you attempt to access undefined properties. No mention of this in Professional JavaScriptThis is all just to get to this point: There is a lot of good information here. However, the information isn't well organized, and I am not sure who the audience is. Some of the information is also incomplete. If you're an experienced programmer learning JavaScript this is a fine starting point. There are other starting points to consider too. For my tastes, I would prefer something that is better organized and went more indepth into the language features and spent less time explaining standard concepts in OO languages. Or do so and market the book as a beginner's book.

Best book for novice JavaScript programmers to become a pro.

Good book from an experienced author from Yahoo. Glad to have it now on my shelf with JavaScript literature books.

This book is great. I used it to better learn JavaScript some time ago and now I come back to it every so often as a reference, because it is extremely thorough for the most part.For the JavaScript student, chapter 1 to 7 cover JavaScript itself and are a must read. The material in those chapters is painstakingly detailed and will cover everything you need to know about JavaScript, short of writing a JavaScript interpreter. Also, not only is the material thorough, but very well explained as well.However, it is worth noting that the book is heavily biased toward browser development and includes a lot of browser specific details that developers writing JavaScript strictly for another environment (notably, Node.js) won't need. As such, such users might be better served by another JavaScript book.If you do intend to write JavaScript in the browser though, this book is your holy grail. In addition to the chapters mentioned above (plus chapters 17, 22 and 24), the other chapters cover various application specific JavaScript APIs for the browser. Those chapters are best left to be read later once you need them and can be read independently from each other once your JavaScript base is solid. For example, chapters 9 to 13 are unlikely to be of much use to you if you use jQuery (or other libraries) for feature detection, event handling or DOM manipulation unless you really want to know what is happening under the hood in more details than you'll likely need.The book also gives a suitable introduction to HTML5 APIs, though seriously learning some of those APIs is best done with a book more dedicated to that topic with Canvas coming to mind as the worst offender here (chapter 15 dedicates 35 pages to it, but there are entire books written about it). The coverage for emerging HTML APIs was similarly slim (they all hold a subsection of chapter 25, but entire chapters in other books are dedicated to those APIs).So overall, this is an almost perfect book for those looking to learn JavaScript for browser development. You'll learn the basics with an emphasis on browser development as well as application specific APIs that you can pick up as needed. You'll also get introduced to HTML5 APIs. This is an easy 5 stars for the books' intended audience.

I certainly wouldn't recommend that book to beginners insofar as it doesn't teach how to program or what programming is in truth. Before delving in that "Javascript Bible", one should be at ease with the language, or at least understand all the concepts laying behind the language; a beginner would start with an appropriate book such as "A Smarter Way to Learn JavaScript" so that all the base concepts would be assimilated. After having done that, I can say it's the best reference book I've ever read so far. Everything you should know about JavaScript is written, even obscure things that nearly everybody has forgotten for ages.

Este libro no es para tomarlo a la ligera. Requiere ciertos conocimientos previos sobre programación JS aunque todos los conceptos son expuestos de forma clara. Es más una obra de referencia que un libro para leer de tirón. No busques ninguna referencia a jQuery u otros frameworks. Sus más de 900 páginas está dedicados a JS/EcmaSript puro. Eso sí, es una joya.