PragProg CoffeeScript Book Released | Hacker News Reader

PragProg CoffeeScript Book Released

pragprog.com

80 pointsZachhack14 comments

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Well, that's one hell of a way to find out about what a college acquaintance has been up to for the past year or so.

Congrats, Trevor!

To round out the reading list:

http://arcturo.com/library/coffeescript/

http://autotelicum.github.com/Smooth-CoffeeScript/

Trevor won me as a customer when he personally answered and solved my coffeescript problem on stackoverflow.

I'm the author.

Writing about CoffeeScript has been a great experience. I'll continue to spread the word about the language with articles, conference talks, and perhaps screencasts—stay tuned.

It's worth mentioning that this is also the first book in print to offer substantial coverage of Node.js. I'm pretty happy about that. It's really, really cool to be able to write both the front and back ends of an app in the same language.

I pre-ordered at Amazon quite awhile ago. Three days ago they changed the estimated arrival date from 10/5-8 to 9/7-12. If the book is actually being released tomorrow then hopefully Amazon will update the date again.. it would be sad if I had to wait six more weeks.

I strongly suspect you'll get your book sooner than that. I've asked my editors at PragProg repeatedly why the Amazon release date is so far in the future; it seems to be some sort of glitch. People who ordered their print copies directly from PragProg have already started receiving them.

I hope you're right. I should have bought directly from Pragmatic but the convenience of Amazon won out.

ps: congratulations on the book

Anybody else really bothered by this?

     CoffeeScript is JavaScript done right.

Does CoffeeScript somehow fixes all the quirks of the javascript language that we've grown s/to love/with?

not all, but many. The problem I have with it is that I find myself mentally translating from CS to JS while trying to program in it, which seems like more effort than just programming in JS to begin with.

Pardon a bit of advertising rhetoric. Let me make a couple of more precise statements:

1. Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, dislikes its syntax (he was famously told to "make it look like Java" even though its semantics are derived from Smalltalk and Lisp) and has become a fan of CoffeeScript. He blurbed the book and, as CTO of the Mozilla corporation, has been pushing to develop tools for debugging languages that compile to JavaScript within Firefox.

2. CoffeeScript doesn't fix all of JavaScript's quirks. Roughly half of what you'll find at wtfjs.com is applicable to CoffeeScript. (Most of the other half involves `==`.) As JS gets faster, it'll become more practical to use JS as a VM to run languages that offer niceties like every number being a BigDecimal. But for now, CoffeeScript is an excellent compromise: Fewer quirks and much less boilerplate than JS, with little to no loss in efficiency when used properly.

Just ordered it because I used coffeescript on a project with good results. But by the time I get it, read it, and write a review on Hacker news this post will no longer be on the front page. :'-( sad

But people will still find it through search engines if you write it up on your blog and link to it from here.

WOO! Just came in the mail! Can't wait to read through it!

Congrats Trevor!

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