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Comment by drongoking | Hacker News Reader

Is this worth buying/borrowing if you already know programming languages but not Javascript? Or is there a better approach?

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No because this is an introduction to programming using JavaScript. A quick look at the table of contents shows Part 1 teaches basic OOP, Part 2 teaches basic client side web development, and Part 3 teaches basic server side development using Node. Having read the 2nd edition of this book, I can assure that if you can explain what any of the 3 main topics described in this book are in a few sentences, then you have advanced well beyond this book being useful.

The chapters from 13 on are great for anyone as an intro to how JS interacts with the browser.

I agree with the other commenters that the early chapters would probably move a little slow for an experience programmer, though it is beautifully written and the interactive snippets are great, so you might still enjoy it if you don't mind skimming. Or if you know some languages but only have a few years of experience I would say beginner intros to new languages are still good. Eloquent JavaScript is a really nice overview of clean programming style in JS as well as the language itself.

IMO, no. It has too much ceremony to demonstrate concepts. It's for absolute beginners.

Definitely NOT recommended for absolute beginners. I tried reading this as one of my first programming books and it confused the hell out of me. There are much better introductory books/courses - my recommendation is "Watch and Code - Practical Javascript" if you are an absolute beginner and want to learn javascript.

https://watchandcode.com/p/practical-javascript

Eloquent Javascript is a good book now that I know more about Javascript, but please NEVER EVER recommend it as the first book for an absolute beginner.

marked this,thx, btw, I always want to choose head first series to be my 1st book, what do ya think compare with eloquent JS for absolute beginner?

I skimmed through head first, it seems pretty good but similar to a lot of other books. The watch and code course is different and I just think it’s so on point for the absolute beginner, or at least how I like to learn.

With 20/20 hindsight, what I wish I had done is read through or watch one or two courses without any pressure, just get familiar with the topic, and don’t worry if I don’t understand things.

things start clicking into place after you’re exposed to this stuff a few times. My mistake was that I wanted to understand everything and didn’t want to skip ahead if I didn’t.

Have to agree with this. I was just reading through to try to figure out its pitch, and was struck by this (early on): "To create a value, you must merely invoke its name. This is convenient. You don’t have to gather building material for your values or pay for them. You just call for one, and whoosh, you have it"

I mean, that's totally correct, but that's paragraph 7. It's way too abstract for a beginner to understand - and usually, if a beginner is getting lost in the first few pages, they're unlikely to make progress in the book (even though they probably could in this case, by skipping ahead a bit).

From my personal experience, I was not ready for this book when I was a beginner at took a stab at reading it. I had written in JavaScript before and stumbled upon this book through the Internet, and it demotivated the life out of me.

I am now about a year and a half of being deeper into the language, and I have finally picked the book back up again.

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