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Need best Javascript books suggestion
28 points by alifaziz on June 26, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 25 comments
Seriously I don't want to depend on Jquery magics most of the time to do awesome UI stuffs on web page. I need some best Javascript books to learn in deeper level. JSON, AJAX, string manipulation etcs..

I need best javascript books/URLs suggestion to learn javascript. Thanks people.




"JavaScript: The Good Parts" by Crockford and "JavaScript: The Definitive Guide" by Flanagan are all you need, at least for the language itself


Just for the record Flanagan book has a new edition covering ECMAScript 5.


JavaScript: The Definitive Guide covers almost everything. If you take the time to read it, you'll know javascript very well. Then get into jQuery (this guide looks good: http://www.rebeccamurphey.com/jqfundamentals).


My personal experience is "Javascript: The Definitive Guide" feels like a tome. It's a big, dry book. It doesn't stimulate my mind and I skimmed through most of it(chapters dedicated to looping syntax et al.).

"Javascript: The Good Parts" worked wonders for me. I understand the language and I use JQuery for dom manipulation. I understand ground-level DOM and can use it when required. Do you think "Javascript: The Definitive Guide" adds something good which "Javascript: The Good Parts" skips? There are many things but I am talking things which make you a better Javascripter.


I learned JavaScript from The Definitive Guide before The Good Parts came out, so maybe my opinion is skewed, but I don't think Good Parts covers enough material to be useful on it's own (Good Parts doesn't cover DOM APIs at all, for example).

I can tell you Definitive Guide also sat next to my desk to serve as a reference for a long time, though most of the same material can be found on https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript http://www.w3schools.com/js/default.asp and many other websites.


It's probably not quite what you requested, but everyone who is seriously into JavaScript ought to pick up Douglas Crockford's "JavaScript: The Good Parts"!


JavaScript: The Good Parts

Absolutely, it is really the 101 of JavaScript and helps you avoid a lot of the pitfalls that gave the language a bad name for so many years.

JavaScript: the definitive guide, is also a good book.

Object-Oriented JavaScript: Create scalable, reusable high-quality JavaScript applications and libraries.

As well most all of John Resig books are good.


The book is very concise and probably one of the books with higher ratio of relevant content per page. It also teaches you the grammar of JavaScript in one of the most simple and unambiguous ways I ever seen in a book (railroad diagrams).

On the other hand it was one of the shortest book I ever read in which I had to reread and go back more times. JavaScript can be a bit confusing at times and the book only says things once and in a succinct way.

Everything was going fine until Prototypes and Constructors and the very bad 'new' operator, that somewhat surprisingly was used in the good function which achieved Prototype Inheritance (example in here: http://javascript.crockford.com/prototypal.html), but after a while I got it. ;)

It's the only book I've read about JavaScript yet. I consider it very good if you already are proficient in other programming languages, but it doesn't really show you what to do with it (and it wasn't supposed to), so I'm now planing to buy JavaScript the Definitive Guide.


On a related note, http://www.jslint.com/ (written by Crockford) is a fantastic tool to keep your JavaScript clean.

Crockford also has some interesting articles at: http://javascript.crockford.com/


Thanks! Will look at it


John Resig has a book in the works - "Secrets of the Javascript Ninja" - http://www.manning.com/resig/ (From what I have seen of the alpha release, it's nice).


Ah crap, I accidentally downvoted you instead of upvoting. This is a good book, and you can read a lot of it even before it's released via MEAP.


(I upvoted on InclinedPlane's behalf.)


John Resig's, Pro Javascript Techniques was great. It covers good ground and from it you could see how to build something like jQuery yourself.


http://eloquentjavascript.net/


Not a book, but a great source of information beyond basic syntax is http://ejohn.org/apps/learn/


The JavaScript Anthology is good. It doesn't focus on the language details a whole lot, but gives tons of hands on examples. My copy is battered pretty bad with coffee spilled all over it. That's a good sign.

Also, John Resig (of jQuery fame) wrote an excellent book called Pro JavaScript Techniques. I read it every year. It is a very detailed exploration of the language fundamentals and beyond.


He also wrote "Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja" -- which isn't officially released yet, but you can preorder and get a PDF of it: http://jsninja.com/


Thank you jbail


Check here. It's a rating of what people consider the best JavaScript books:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/74884/good-javascript-boo...

But personally, I like Crockford's book the good parts. The Oreilly definitive guide isn't bad either.


Crockford's Javascript: The Good Parts, Stoyan Stefanov's books, and Zakas's High Performance Javascript. Also don't forget about http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/theater/. There are a ton of good video lectures to learn from.


JavaScript and Web Performance books you need to read http://www.integralist.co.uk/javascript/javascript-and-web-p...

Really all you need


Test Driven JavaScript Development by Christian Johansen.

http://www.amazon.com/Test-Driven-JavaScript-Development-Dev...

Not out yet, though.


If you want to know how to do what jQuery is doing, then read the jQuery source.


Object Oriented Javascript by Stoyan Stefanov is worth a read, especially if you've already slogged thru Poppa Crockford's tomes.




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