Book Review: JavaScript Enlightenment

29 Jul 2011

This week jQuery team member Cody Lindley self-published the book entitled JavaScript Enlightenment.

If you recall he wrote another great resource a year or so ago called jQuery Enlightenment.

As you’ve probably heard me talk about before, it is important for a jQuery developer to really know the JavaScript language. Thankfully Cody has written this book to aid in this learning process.

Who is the Target Audience of this Book?

The book targets developers who are already JavaScript Library User (jQuery, dojo, YUI, etc…) and seeks to deepen their knowledge and transform them into a JavaScript Developer.

The audience isn’t intended for beginner JavaScript developers. There is an assumption that you somewhat familiar with using a JavaScript library. If you are a developer that wants to deepen your understanding of JavaScript then this book is for you!

If you do consider yourself a beginner JavaScript or jQuery developer then you might consider going over to appendTo’s new learning site where they have free videos and exercises to guide you through learning these concepts.

What does the book Cover?

The book covers JavaScript 1.5 (also known as ECMA-262 Edition 3), which is the most prevelant version of JavaScript. The book won’t be covering some of the new ECMAScript 5 features, but Cody hints that another book might be coming out the in the future to cover some of these new features that are making themselves into current browsers.

What to Expect in the book?

It is Cody’s style to have lots of code examples in his book. The great thing about this is that he provides a jsFiddle link to the code so that you can pull it up in your browser and play around with it until the concept sinks in. I really enjoyed this in his last book (jQuery Enlightenment) and I’m also loving it in this book.

Cody even goes to explain that the words in the book describing the code should be secondary to the code itself. The examples are there to help you understand what is going on, which is great!

High Level Overview of Contents? 

Cody’s book has 15 main chapters and each of them are broken up into much smaller pieces, but to spare you the who table of contents I’ve just listed out the top level chapters for you to look over below…

Chapter 01 - JavaScript Object Chapter 02 - Working with Objects and Properties Chapter 03 - Object() Chapter 04 - Function() Chapter 05 - The Head/Global Object Chapter 06 - The this Keyword Chapter 07 - Scope & Closures Chapter 08 - Prototype Property Chapter 09 - Array() Chapter 10 - String() Chapter 11 - Number() Chapter 12 - Boolean Chapter 13 - Null Chapter 14 - Undefined Chapter 15 - Math Function

You can actually preview all of Chapter 6 - The this Keyword on the Nettuts website if you are curious as to what some of the content looks like in the book.

Should I Get this Book?

There is a lot of great material in this book. Most of book is coding examples which means that you can get through it fairly quickly. The book is able to fit in a ton of information in less than 150 pages! I highly recommend this book. There is a lot of value jam packed in this book for a price tag of $15.