JavaScript Succinctly was written to give readers an accurate, concise examination of JavaScript objects and their supporting nuances, such as complex values, primitive values, scope, inheritance, the head object, and more. If you’re an intermediate JavaScript developer and want to solidify your understanding of the language, or if you’ve only used JavaScript beneath the mantle of libraries such as jQuery or Prototype, this is the book for you.
Cody Lindley is a front-end/JavaScript developer and recovering Flash developer. He has an extensive background working professionally (20+ years) with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and client-side performance techniques as it pertains to web development. If he is not wielding client-side code he is likely toying with interface/interaction design or front-end application architecture. When not sitting in front of a computer, it's a sure bet he is hanging out with his wife & three boys in Meridian, Idaho. In his spare time Cody is working towards being a "One Dollar Apologist" and enjoys defending the evidence for a classical Christian world-view with reason and empathy at c-m-c-a.com.
This is a strange little book. Not totally useless but not what it states either. Firstly, this is not Succinct. Secondly it doesn't cover the entire scope of javaScript, or how to use it practically. What it does do is talk at length on the Object oriented design of JavavaScript. If this was called "OOP with JavaScript" it would have been the perfect book for the name. but it wasn't.
I did like it, it just wasn't what I had expected. The style is clear. The examples, while on the simple side serve their purpose well enough. This is a great book if you come from C#. There are quite a few subtle & not so subtle differences in how scope is determined, how instantiation occurs as well as many other differences. It give you a brief but reasonable overview of closures, discusses how Functions are first class citizens, the loose ness of types & other pitfalls one may have when using the language. It very briefly goes over the built in functions, immutable functions JavaScript offers. What it doesn't do is discuss in any way anything that is not strictly in the JavaScript framework, which may sound fine but as it is so closely tied & used with HTML, CSS & the DOM, it would really leave a first time user scratching ones head about what to do with this language.
The book is free, well written & has enough information to leave you educated, even if only a little more, even if only in one aspect of this amazing language. For that I give it the stars I do, but for the title I take stars away. Good book, wrong title.
Kind of idiosyncratic in format and philosophy, and definitely not for everyone. Philosophically though and from the standpoint of building slowly from definitional foundations, this was an excellent book in my opinion. The author builds the reader's vocab, and shows what is going on in Javascript under the hood. Really does a good job of showing that everything in Javascript is an object and what that really conceptually means. If practicality is your thing, or you're just looking for some useful methods, this book would basically be useless to you.
The book should probably be called "JavaScript OBJECTS Succinctly"; because that's what it explains. It does that actually well, but I think with a lot more detail than probably necessary (because it is targeted at people who already can write programs, who probably need less detail - frequent skipping made it a quick read for me) but does not really explain the JavaScript language itself or how to actually write programs with it (which I expected considering the name of the book). Things like "for/if/while" are used (and thus are explained by demonstration), but not explained. Many if not most of the examples are academic, which is ok for "already-developers"; but may be a turn-off for beginners. This book is not for you if you are a beginner and want to quick start your ability to write JS-code. If you have started js and want to make sure you understand the object model (which you should) - then give it a go.
Started off nicely, but somewhere in the middle felt like the level dropped a bit. It was said to be for programmers familiar with js (which I'm familiar with, but haven't worked with), and not new to the concepts of programming, but even though felt like there were several ideas that could have been explained much more briefly (e.g. the fact that everything is an object) and perhaps give some more complex examples (I had played with the ideas myself and tried some of those).
also, sadly this is a rather old book, written in the times of ECMA3 which no one uses or must know about too much
Note, this book does NOT teach js syntax, or is a cookbook for tricks and cool stuff in the language, as it is stated in the abstract of the book.