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Comment by rudenoise | Hacker News Reader

I think this is probably a re-post, but worth repeating for those who may have missed it.

Complete this, read JavaScript The Good Parts and JS becomes more pleasurable. If you're interested in improving, I highly recommend taking an hour to work through this tutorial in the console.

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How does JS: TGP compare to JS: The Definitive Guide (Flanagan)? I have Flanagan but am curious as to whether TGP is worth buying also.

I also recently found the Crockford videos here: http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/theater/ I watched the first one yesterday. It was a nice intro to what I might call the philosophy of/behind JavaScript, and I'm hoping the others give me a few "aha!" moments about how to design my code.

Think of TGP as a filtered version of TDG. It's a high impact, low word count book that covers 90% of what you'll ever need to know for Javascript.

TDG, on the other hand, tells you _everything_.

I haven't read/used TDG in a while; I have read/used TGP recently. TGP is definitely "Aha," compared to TDG's "Oh, OK." Both have their place; TGP is handier to understanding and working with some of JS' quirks.

I read TGP, and then I started using Google's Closure compiler. What I found was that Crokford recommends a lot of his own special ways of writing JS, and that they really aren't that great. To me Crokford's book is living in a pre-Closure-Compiler world, one where JSLint was the best tool to help you write good JS code, but in a CC world, Crokford's functional inheritance and use of JSLint are bad in the former, and unnecessary in the latter.

EDIT: Inheritance Patterns in JavaScript by Michael Bolin:

http://www.bolinfest.com/javascript/inheritance.php

Can you give some other examples of Crockford's advice that you'd disregard or how the Closure Compiler affects the way you write JavaScript?

I don't have his book in in front of me, but I remember him introducing and using helper function on the Object prototype to aid in inheritance.

I read his book because it holds such an authoritative place in JS literature. Last year, I began writing an application which has grown to over 6K lines of JS. At this level, pure JS become unwieldy, IMO. I went looking for a technology to help my code stay organized, optimized, and well documented. Closure Compiler was it. But since I had created my inheritance structure following Crokford's functional methodology, CC wouldn't work with it. Also, the only game in town for documenting JS, is jsDoc, in it's various incarnations. At 7K LOC, I wanted good docs for future developers. jsDoc doesn't work with functional inheritance either, strictly prototypical.

The bottom line for me is: Read the book, for sure, but if you plan on writing a large JS application, and go looking for help from a technology like CC (or maybe even DoJo), beware, that Crokford's recommendations (and they do come authoritatively) might put you in a place where you have to do a lot of refactoring down the road.

Writing JS for a framework is not the same as writing JS from scratch. Satisfying the Closure compiler is not what TGP sets out to do, nor should it.

TGP will give you a sound understanding of the possible techniques you can employ to form a JS application.

A book on Closure will give you a sound understanding of how to use that specific framework.

TGP teaches the language, its interpreter and some styles that can be used as building blocks for JS applications.

TDG is a reference for the language, DOM implementations (which is a large portion of the book), tools and many aspects of the JS ecosystem.

The Good Parts is concise and elegant; reading and practising it thoroughly will lead to a sound understanding of what makes JS a uniquely powerful language.

Read both, but if you can only manage one make it TGP.

It's great, but certainly is pretty old - look at the source of the linked jQuery: "jQuery 1.2.6 - New Wave Javascript"! I don't think that tag line stuck ;)

It is pretty old; I think I've seen it twice on here and three times on reddit.

Good tutorial, though and of course still relevant. It would be great if John (or another JSer) would update or add to it.

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