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Comment by kabes | Hacker News Reader

I can highly recommend these books. They're one of the only books that do a real deep-dive into the language. I often have to interview people for javascript jobs. It's astonishing how few of them actually get how the `this` keyword, closures, prototypes etc work. So the title of the series may be arrogant, but not wrong.

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I fully agree, those books are awesome if you want to truly understand JS. I would, however, not say that understanding JS will help you become a better programmer and the time invested in fully understanding JS might be better invested somewhere else.

Some parts of "understanding JS" is just understanding a (insert your swearword) designed language, unfortunately. You might just not fully understand those parts and call them the bad parts. I can't stand not understanding, though.

That's why I would recommend to read also "JavaScript: The Good Parts" (book, 2008) by Douglas Crockford. It covers (what is nowadays known as Javascript 1.5) and highlights the good parts of the language.

Actually, Simpson in his "you don't know JS" series of books makes a statement against "Javascript: the good parts". The main argument is that it's actually "Javascript: the easy parts". So crockford basically says "Just don't use the things most people find confusing when starting with JS". Instead, Simpson argues it's better to understand the language thoroughly so you can use all of its features to your advantage.

I believe the truth lies somewhere in between. You will have a really rough time programming JS with the good parts only, but you will also have a rough time annoying your colleagues when you are the only one using "this" in a place where it's considered a bug by most people.

@davnn you said it well. Most of the Javascript "Bad Reputation all these years" comes from the Language designed 20 years ago and did not change much mainly due to the fact that it is linked to ALL Browser vendor support at the SAME TIME ( to make any webpage JS to work). Assume a senario like where Ruby/Python could not change for last 20 years from their version 0.5

Now with ES6 and Babel Translator everybody can write ES6 code ( with out OLD JS BAD parts ) and enjoy JS as a true high level language like Ruby/Python . http://es6-features.org/#ClassInheritance

http://es6-features.org/#ClassInheritance

I think "JavaScript: The Good Parts" is outdated now, in particular the way it advocates handling object-oriented programming and inheritance with a "roll your own" method. It was great for its time, but especially with the advent of ES2015, modern JavaScript is going in a different direction.

My point was, it's not outdated. Javascript 2016 just got new featured that oviously aren't covered. The class syntax is just a syntactic sugar and it's important to understand how it's working under the hood. JS has prototype based inheritance, which is more powerful and flexible than class based inheritance. JS is therefor different to grasp than Java and C#. There are still many coding JS and don't get it.

I don't recommend using the class syntax and I would even advise to favour composition over inheritance.

Sadly, I think JS is at its best with most of ES3, a little of ES5, and drop of ES6. There's still a tiny, good (Ok... adequate) language underneath all the cruft. But unfortunately there's a lot of extra unnecessary complexity in JS that makes it easy for us to write unneccesarily complex and unreliable code.

And unfortunately, I think that because that complexity is there, programmers may feel they have to understand and use that complexity. Instead they should be actively preventing it from entering their brains and their codebase.

Even if you do understand how things like prototypes work, you will also need to understand how efficiently a compiler can implement changes to them. And how consistent/predictable the resulting code will be in terms of speed.

It's understandable since it was designed to be a scripting language, easy to pick up and be productive with only a superficial understanding.

You have to get your mind oriented to concepts like closures and prototypes - there's a natural barrier there between the js dev and the real expert. People can get jobs without making the leap. I would think they can keep their job. But at some point having only the superficial understanding will have to be compensated for, maybe in technical debt.

I agree. Having interviewed many people for JS jobs I have realised they actually don't know the language. The pressure these days is on frameworks. Do you know React? Angular? The assumption being that if someone can find they way around a framework they know the language. Not true.

Kyle's efforts to educate people are priceless and he's doing great job. I have watched two of his courses on Frontend Masters, I don't agree with everything he says, but I have great respect for the guy and for his work.

This is too true. I've had a software engineer complain to me at how unfair his last interview was because they asked "esoteric javascript" questions in a front-end javascript development position.

I asked him what questions he found tricky and a lot of them are really simple javascript 'things' (scopes, closure, iife, etc) that would come up sooner or later when you're working with the language

I think there is still a lingering mentality that you don't have to be an expert with JS to do front end work, and that's just not the case anymore.

People treat js as a toy language then get upset when people use it to build actual applications.

This is such a true statement.

I still remember being at a conference about 6 years ago. We were on lunch and talking shop with several other front-end developers. Of course jQuery comes up and people start asking if they should learn "vanilla" JS first before using jQuery.

Still remember one developer blurting out, "Yeah, jQuery is so easy to use, you just cop/paste the code, you don't even really have to know JS. I don't see any reason to learn the basics of JS." The crazy thing is there were a lot of heads nodding in agreement at the table. That's how it used to be, if a developer needed to do something with jQuery, they'd just look for a plugin and use that.

Today? No way can get away without knowing the language. Too many frameworks, too many options to mix/match languages to get a really good workflow process. You can't just jump in and not know how Angular directives work or Backbone collections work without knowing exactly how these things work.

IT's a different world out there nowadays.

> Today? No way can get away without knowing the language.

Maybe not in the word of startups and Silicon Valley, but there are tons of jobs for web developers across the world where simple jQuery knowledge will make you the best front end developer at your company.

That's not to say it's a good things. It's just a fact of life for many companies. Anyone better than that will leave before long for the greener pastures that you're referring to.

the way I experienced it was really the word Front End really just went through different meanings. There are a lot of UI jobs where javascript isn't a major focus, though some of it is there. Despite what is heard on hacker news, a lot of dev is happening without angular, react etc.

I used to answer to jobs for Front End developer, but now you see Front end jobs posted with no relationship to design arts. Those positions are now UI Web Designer. Front End now from my perspective at looking at job postings might as well be javascript only or javascript plus SASS.

Agreed.

After reading these books I was kicking myself for not doing it sooner. All the JS mysteries just fade away as you go through it.

Here is my review for JavaScript coding interviews.[0] I should update the REST API section a little since I learned how to use Swagger.

[0]: https://github.com/adam-s/js-interview-review

This is a good list! Thanks for the links to Regex Crossword and RegexOne - they look useful.

Thanks for sharing, that's a great list as I'm approaching js related interview questions.

The problem is that there are a lot of developers who have obtained an 'expert' level understanding of some corner of software development who then wrongly gain the perception that that understanding is both necessary and reasonably expected among the general population of developers. It's not far away from interviewing an English teacher in Japan and expecting them to understand Latin because "latin is the foundation of English".

I think the books would take you to a basic knowledge of JS rather than expert level. This is the problem - the amount you need to know to be an effevtive programmer is growing out of control, as we attempt to make more ambitious applications than 10 years ago, for a decreasing (in real terms, unless you are in SV) salary. That means more weekends studying (working for free) to keep your place in this industry.

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