Kyle Simpson

Software is eating the world, the web is eating software, and JavaScript rules the web. The irony is that JavaScript (as of 2018) is still a vastly misunderstood programming language regarded in many quarters as a toy or kludge limited to handling DOM manipulations and browser events. Worse, if you're a current front or backend web developer coming to grips with JavaScript you are likely to be misled by hundreds of out-of-date online tutorials purporting to teach you "The Good Parts" of the language to the detriment of an in-depth understanding of the ecosystem, performant code, mechanics of lambdas, closures, prototypes, and other higher order functions.

This is where the You Don't Know JS Yet series by Kyle Simpson rides in, Zorro-like, to save the day. As a first book on JavaScript, it is everything that I thought it could be: concise, tightly written, absolutely disciplined, and devoid of the dead-tree filler found in much thicker programming books. I cannot recommend this series highly enough for anyone interested in JS. Instead of learning just enough to be dangerous, if you work through this series (preferably open in your browser of choice while writing and running all the code examples in your Developer Tools console), you should emerge with an understanding of closures, coercion, scope, hoisting, and the this identifier.

Get Started also provides a lot of background instruction for those with limited programming experience in any language. As such, it's a great place to start for those new to software development as well as experienced programmers who want to quickly get up to speed on this crucial piece of the web platform.… (altro)