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Comment by RyanZAG | Hacker News Reader

Nice book, but seems to be very focused on 'this is the one true way'. There is very rarely ever 'one true way' for all problems, and the reasoning given for each choice isn't solid enough to consider it a closed problem.

It would have been great if there was a small part of each section given to a short discussion of other alternative options that could be taken if the first approach isn't working out for the team. eg, the book's requirement to use specific libs like CommonJS

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> seems to be very focused on 'this is the one true way'.

Good. I hate when the goal (of building something, of answering the question) is obscured by the author's need to show how knowledgeable or insecure they are and share 15 different ways to do something. Not every piece of writing is a philosophical treatise.

Though sure, a short list of alternatives wouldn't hurt. The justifications for our choices OTOH expand quickly because humans seem to be really good at those[1].

EDIT: fixed, thanks.

[1] http://www.overcomingbias.com/2013/04/talkative-sell-silent-...

Also you can make the decision on your own.

* read a book * extract what you think is good * throw the rest of information away

> Not every piece of writing is a philosophical treaty

I think you might mean treatise.

Simply allowing more than one way to do something does not mean that you have a "need to show how knowledgeable or insecure [you] are".

If it's a beginners book, one way is always the best.

Provided that one way is both achievable for beginners, and a healthy practice to continue in the absence of further development. You don't want beginners thinking some terrible practice is how they are supposed to build things, just because it was the only workable thing you could use to introduce them to the topic.

I didn't read it that way. The author goes to some effort to point out the reasoning behind the choices made, and also goes in-depth explaining the options between client-centric and server-centric designs, and where the trade-offs are. While it's true that only one type of implementation is discussed in detail, it would be impractical to discuss the popular frameworks without getting lost in pointless detail.

It's excellent for someone, like me, who's new to JavaScript development. Until you can build up a frame of reference, it's difficult to understand why one approach works over another, even when someone spells it out for you.

An article that just says "this works and is easy" is sometimes what you need to just start writing some damn code.

You could import it in http://www.dotdotdot.me and start annotating it.

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