Comment by Stratoscope | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Stratoscope | Hacker News Reader

I was reading HN on my phone, and this looked interesting, so I tapped the link. It took me to a brief page describing the three parts of the book, with a headline and one sentence about each part. At the bottom it said:

read online at:

• http://www.frontendhandbook.com

So I tapped the link. It opened a new tab with a brief page describing the three parts of the book, a headline and one sentence about each part. At the bottom it said:

read online at:

• http://www.frontendhandbook.com

So I tapped the link. It opened a new tab with a brief page describing the three parts of the book, a headline and one sentence about each part. At the bottom it said:

read online at:

• http://www.frontendhandbook.com

So I tapped the link.

Wait! Haven't I been here before?

There must be some other way to read the book.

Hmm... Some faint little gray icons at the top. Nothing there jumps out at me as a way to read the book. I keep wanting to go back to that compelling "read online at:" link.

But this time I skip past it. I go all the way to the bottom of the page where there is a faint gray angle bracket. What does it do?

I did it! I made it to the first chapter! Now I can read the Front-end Developer Handbook.

This is a true story. I really did tap the link that many times. I am not making any of this up.

100% agreed. It's not well-designed on the front-end for mobile. That would make me skeptical about the book itself since it's supposed to be about...front-end design.

But I think one should be careful about the distinction between front-end design and development. This book seems to focus on development, and as someone who's taken a couple of courses from Frontend Masters, I trust it to be solid.

Indeed. And I'm sure Cody will see that this is fixed.

I had a chance to work with Cody on the jQuery Cookbook, and he's a smart guy. So Cody, if you see this, my apologies for poking fun at your new book's mobile experience!

My chapter of the jQuery Cookbook had a much bigger blunder. In a "recipe" called Coding Bare-Metal Loops, I recommended a particular loop style as the ultimate in speed...

> Use a for loop instead of .each(). To iterate over an array, it’s hard to beat this loop:

  for( var item, i = −1; item = array[++i] ) {
      // do stuff with item
  }

> But there is a catch: this loop works only if your array has no “false” elements, that is, elements whose value is undefined, null, false, 0, or "". Even with that restriction, this loop is useful in many common cases, such as iterating over a jQuery object.

Well... It didn't quite turn out that way. This loop style can kick you out of the optimizer because it tries to access the nonexistent element after the end of the array. That's perfectly legal in JavaScript, of course - any nonexistent element evaluates as undefined - but code optimizers do not like it when you do that.

So a conventional loop turned out to be much faster:

http://jsperf.com/mikes-loops/2

I hate it when people call these dumb loose pages a book.

Just like cotton in a bag isn't a comforter, a website with itsy-bitsy manuscript is not a fucking book.

So ...

> Poking fun?

Not at all.

What's your point?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com