The passages above give me mixed feelings, but I will start with the good: This does not mean extracting everything from the book that it has to offer.
But for those who have taken my Get the Most From Technical Books free email course, you know that I am also about speed and extracting the most value from the time you invest. With Get Started, you do need to slow down to get the maximum benefit from the book.
That's OK, because there's a whole book series ahead of you to keep exploring!Īnd it’s true. Even still, you'll probably finish this chapter with remaining questions.
As I've said a dozen times already, take your time. Take your time.ĭon't run so quickly through this material that you get lost in the weeds. It's long and there's plenty of detail to chew on. Please don't expect this chapter to be a quick read. Instead, patience and persistence are best as you take these first few steps. So don't look at this book as something to rush through for a quick achievement. No matter how much time you spend with the language, you will always be able to find something else to learn and understand a little better. I emphasize the word journey because knowing JS is not a destination, it's a direction. Here is one such example from Chapter 1: About this Book: The book also warns about equality mistakes that Javascript makes.Įach chapter gets started with a bit of a warning: slow down and take your time. Get Started also shares that null returns object with the typeof operator, which is a Javascript bug to be cautious of. For example, yes, functions are objects, but when you use the `typeof` operator on a function, it will return function but when you use the typeof operator on an array, it returns object. It even acknowledges some strangeness up front. Get Started’s greatest strength for me was bringing objects to clarity. Objects are one of the most baffling things for me in Javascript, since the wisdom I commonly receive is “Everything is objects.” It only makes me go cross-eyed and brings me no closer to a Javascript god. Get Started takes the time talking about what objects are in Javascript so that I can fully understand. Instead of seeing Javascript’s strange this handling based on context as a negative or a mistake in Javascript, Get Started clearly explains the thinking behind this, which can inform our thinking when we program. Unlike many other languages, JS's this being dynamic is a critical component of allowing prototype delegation, and indeed class, to work as expected! Indeed, one of the main reasons this supports dynamic context based on how the function is called is so that method calls on objects which delegate through the prototype chain still maintain the expected this. Get Started takes the time to explain not just how this behaves, but why: Get Started takes time with this, since getting clarity around it is a challenge. Unlike other programming languages, this is dynamic. One of the greatest concepts all Javascript developers need to wrap their minds around is the this keyword.
It’s what I live for in software development.Īnd if it’s what you live for too, please read on and learn more about what You Don’t Know JS Yet: Get Started is all about. Everything is about why and how elements exist, which is why I am here. These principles puts me in a place of trusting the book and the wisdom it has to impart.
I believe you can and should learn any features available, and use them where appropriate! It's assuming you are unable to learn and use a feature properly in combination with other features. I believe this to be overly restrictive advice and ultimately unhelpful. It's very common to suggest that var should be avoided in favor of let (or const!), generally because of perceived confusion over how the scoping behavior of var has worked since the beginning of JS. I can sense the You Don’t Know JS Yet series comes from a deeply-felt place of having experienced mistakes Javascript developers make in thinking about the fundamentals of Javascript programming.Īs a front-end web developer, I am hungry for this knowledge, and I am grateful for the information this book provides.Ī great quote highlighting this idea comes from Chapter 2: This is the opposite of the cowboy approach to learning Javascript programming. The author, Kyle Simpson, imbues his writing with the principles in the famous programming book The Pragmatic Programmer: the book empowers all beginning software engineers with the root concepts so that they can think for themselves. The book works to prep you thoroughly on how Javascript really thinks. Its truer title is “Under the Hood,” since the entire idea behind book one of the series is to lift the hood, point out the components, and highlight idiosyncrasies in Javascript. You Don’t Know JS Yet: Get Started should not be called Get Started.