Comments on: JavaScript recommendations?

By: Dori

Dori — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 22:31:42 +0000

Sorry that I just saw this now, and I hope it’s not too late…

If at some point we do end up planning a F2F and you’re still interested at that point in learning more JavaScript, just remind me about this—I’ll bring along my JavaScript book + my JavaScript Essential Training video + my Ajax Essential Training video for you (i.e., does bribery work to encourage a meeting to happen? ;-) ).

My personal opinion of the books mentioned above: they’re all great titles from experts geared towards other experts. Which means, sadly, that if you’re not already a JavaScript Expert™ like the authors, they aren’t a good fit. That is, they’re not the place to start learning JavaScript.

By: ghendry

ghendry — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 02:09:46 +0000

Crockford’s book is good if you already know JS and want to write better code. For starting out in JS, I recommend Object-Oriented JavaScript by Stoyan Stefanov which assumes no JS background.

By: gizmomathboy

gizmomathboy — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 17:42:23 +0000

@Peter Burns

Thanks for the Pro Javascript tip. My tech book budget is rather tight and any good reviews are helpful.

By: Peter Burns

Peter Burns — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 21:52:33 +0000

@gizmomathboy

Pro Javascript techniques wasn’t very useful to me. It reads like “what I learned writing jQuery” – very heavily browser focused, and if you’re already using a library like jQuery a lot of it is unnecessary.

Secrets of the Javascript Ninja is much better, even in its current half-finished state, especially for learning tricky parts of the language rather than just doing common web scripting tasks.

One last tip: I like to have an interactive prompt when I’m developing. There’s a decent one in Firebug, and a quite good one in Safari (enabled in preferences). However if you’re developing for a rhino-based environment like Acre then the best is having a local rhino interpreter on the command line. To run rhino as an interactive prompt the invocation is: java -cp path/to/js.jar org.mozilla.javascript.tools.shell.Main

By: pam

pam — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 19:08:35 +0000

For testing, we’re liking qunit right now. It’s the unit testrunner for jquery, which has good tests (I don’t like using projects without good tests), and the tests provide good docs for both qunit and jquery itself. My other personal preferences would pretty much add +1s to jquery and mongodb.

By: Kristina

Kristina — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 18:01:03 +0000

If you’re interested in backend JavaScript, you could try out MongoDB (www.mongodb.org). It uses JavaScript for server-side scripting, so you can write your whole query in JS. It comes with a JavaScript DB shell, and a couple people are working on stand-alone JS drivers.

By: gizmomathboy

gizmomathboy — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 14:09:28 +0000

I’ve been meaning to get Resig’s book: http://jspro.org/ and he’s working on a new book: http://jsninja.com/

He’s javascript ninja book isn’t quite done yet but you can purchase early access to the first 12 chapters: http://www.manning.com/resig/

I went to his OSCON class 2 years ago and liked it (or were there 2?). In any case those are the three books at the top of my “learn javascript” book list (that I haven’t purchased yet but all signs point to “buy them yesterday”)

By: Andrew Jones

Andrew Jones — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 12:55:54 +0000

YUI includes a unit tester and a good video introducing Test Driven Development: http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/yuitest/

You really need to try a couple of the frameworks (jQuery, YUI, etc) and decide which one fits best for you.

By: Tobias Svensson

Tobias Svensson — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 09:02:35 +0000

There are actually several ways to test in JavaScript. The two most interesting to me are:

http://www.jsunit.net/ (which is a port of JUnit)
http://code.google.com/p/js-test-driver/

By: Tom Braud

Tom Braud — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 08:02:40 +0000

take a look at
Prototypejs.org
and Scriptaculous ( which contains http://wiki.github.com/madrobby/scriptaculous/unit-testing as well )