What do you love/hate about Professional JavaScript?
Will all the excitement over the release of Professional Ajax, 2nd Edition, I didn’t want people to think that I was leaving my first book, Professional JavaScript for Web Developers behind. In fact, I’m now going through it to figure out what should and shouldn’t be in a second edition. To aid in this decision, I’d like to ask you. Basically, I’d like to know answers to these questions:
- What did you like about the book?
- What did you hate about the book?
- What were your three favorite chapters?
- What were your three least favorite chapters?
- Are there any chapters that should be removed?
- What’s missing from the book?
Feel free to leave these as comments on this blog post or to email me directly. Either way, I want to know what you think so that the next edition of Professional JavaScript for Web Developers will be as helpful to you, if not moreso, than the first.
Disclaimer: Any viewpoints and opinions expressed in this article are those of Nicholas C. Zakas and do not, in any way, reflect those of my employer, my colleagues, Wrox Publishing, O'Reilly Publishing, or anyone else. I speak only for myself, not for them.
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6 Comments
1) Very good explanations given on almost every aspect of JavaScript. Easy to understand, well written, good examples, very good coverage.
Not too many bad parts left, eh ?
2) I have a few issues with it, but nothing that I actually hated about it.
3) Object Basics, Regular Expressions, DOM Basics
4) Sorting Tables, Interacting with Plugins, Web Services.
5) Sorting Tables
6) A better explanation of JavaScript Closures. Barely any info given, as it’s one of the most important feature of ECMAScript and used quite a lot these days.
Razvan on March 17th, 2007 at 3:14 pm
Professional JavaScript is my favorite of your books. It’s still the best introduction to javascript.
In the second edition, I’d like to see a chapter dedicated to "How to build a code library without conflicting with other code libraries you may use".
After reading your book, I still had to discover how to encapsulate the object models I’d create so that they wouldn’t potentially use the same variable names as some other library I might also include. Maybe I just overlooked that section.
Lonnie Best on March 19th, 2007 at 10:34 am
My favorite chanpters were: 3, 4 and 19. In particular I liked the history lesson in creating objects and some of the optimization stuff in chapt 19. The discussion of the call() method was nice – like to see more.
I’d like to see an expanded discussion on how a function’s scope stack is put together as a transition into a discussion on closures. Also the concept of functions as first class objects in JS and the freedom it implies.
I never read chapts 13 and 18 for some reason… they just didn’t seem interesting so I suppose I wouldn’t mind if they went away.
Never read chapt 20 either but it looks pretty interesting… it’d be nice if you updated this with anything new. Along the same lines how about a few highlights of js 1.6/1.7 as implemented in Firefox
Hans Brough on March 21st, 2007 at 8:11 pm
What did you like about the book?
I like your style of writing and thinking, clear and easy.
What did you hate about the book?
That sometimes you dont write about IE support.
What were your three favorite chapters?
* 9 (!! my favorite, would be interesting if you write more about custom events and some patterns with them).
* 6 – was interesting, but by me Dom travelsal method didn’t worked in IE (I do something incorrect, or IE doesn’t support it?)
* 7, 8
What were your three least favorite chapters?
11, 12, 18
Are there any chapters that should be removed?
maybe 12…
What’s missing from the book?
New techniques of working with objects, functions, something like videos from Douglas Crockford in ydn (Advanced Javascript and Javascript)…something like that missing…
But anyway…your books are super! Thanks!
Dmitry Monin on March 24th, 2007 at 9:06 am
# What did you like about the book?
Clear and easy way to explain things
# What did you hate about the book?
Hate is a strong word, but I would like to see more other browsers in the book. It is very IE centric in some cases. The StringBuffer example is a good example. It is only true in IE that string concatenation is dead slow. Other browsers are pretty fast.
# What were your three favorite chapters?
4, 7 and 20
Chapter 4 could also maybe mention how to "fake" private fields:
function Foo() {
var privateProperty = "private";
var privateMethod = function() {
alert(privateProperty);
}
return {
publicMethod: function() {
privateMethod();
}
}
}
var foo = new Foo();
foo.publicMethod();
# What’s missing from the book?
More about closures. "Pro JavaScript Techniques (Pro)" touches the subject but doesn’t go so deep into it.
Would also be interesting to know more about JavaScript 1.7 that Firefox 2 support (let, iterator, setters and getters etc) and expand chapter 20 on JavaScript 2.0 that will be available in Firefox 4.
Maybe this is already mentioned in the book, but also a few words on the danger of extending native objects.
I really enjoyed the book when it came out and I am looking forward to the second edition.
José Jeria on March 25th, 2007 at 7:06 am
Hey all, thanks for the great feedback. I’d like to point out that when I wrote the book, there was no such thing as Firefox or Safari and IE had over 95% market share, which is why it is so IE-centric. You’ll notice I did make mention of "Mozilla" as an alternative browser, though.
I just wanted to address a few specific issues:
@Dmitry – the DOM traversal objects aren’t implementing in IE, that’s why you can’t get it to work.
@Jose – the StringBuffer example was 100% accurate until Firefox 1.0 came out (which is when they fixed the string concatenation problem). As mentioned before, the book was written before Firefox was out.
Again, thanks for all of the suggestions. I will certainly take it all into account as I start writing again.
Nicholas C. Zakas on March 25th, 2007 at 8:00 pm
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