Ask HN: I've read JS Definitive Guide, Good Parts. What next? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: I've read JS Definitive Guide, Good Parts. What next?

7 pointsstevenklein8 comments

I've read Javascript: The Definitive Guide by David Flanagan and Javascript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford.

What should I read next?

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The question should be "what should I write next?".

Touche.

I posted this last week. Maybe it can help you. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2353962

- Join the jsmentor mailing list.

- Secret of a javascript ninja

- 10 things I learned from the jquery soruce [1]

- 11 More Things I Learned from the jQuery Source [2]

- Read the annotated version of underscore [3]

- write your own plugin. Follow this tutorial from Dailyjs[4]

- Launch emacs and write some code.

[1] http://paulirish.com/2010/10-things-i-learned-from-the-jquer...

[2] http://paulirish.com/2011/11-more-things-i-learned-from-the-...

[3] http://documentcloud.github.com/underscore/docs/underscore.h...

[4] http://dailyjs.com/tags.html#lmaf

Backbone examples as mentioned here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2378190

Great start! Here are a few other books I've read recently and marked the crap out of because there is so much good information in them.

  - JavaScript Patterns by Stoyan Stefanov
  - High Performance JavaScript by Nicholas C. Zakas
  - High Performance Web Sites by Steve Souders
  - Even Faster Web Sites by Steve Souders

Here are a few I haven't read yet but are on my to read list.

  - Object-Oriented JavaScript by Stoyan Stefanov
  - Pro JavaScript Design Patterns by Dustin Diaz, Ross Harmes

Thanks so much everyone for your input. For anyone interested, I asked some people on Twitter and got the following responses.

@rmurphey (Rebecca Murphey): @stevenklein JavaScript Patterns and Object Oriented JavaScript would be next on my list

@thomasfuchs (Thomas Fuchs): @stevenklein http://javascriptrocks.com/performance/ :)

@paul_irish (Paul Irish): @stevenklein what rmurphey said and also zakas's high perf js

raniskeet has a good point; if you've read and really understand the content of both of those, there's not too much that you'll learn from just reading more books. I'm pretty much in the same boat as you (read The Good Parts, started the Def Guide), and my next step is not to read about Javascript, but to read Javascript. Pick a codebase of something you use or want to start using and learn how it ticks.

Depending on what you intend to do, you could do a lot worse than spelunk in the codebase of something like JQuery or YUI.

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