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Comment by Alex3917 | Hacker News Reader

I definitely agree on JavaScript: The Good Parts -- it's quite possibly the single most over-rated book I've ever read.

There is literally a Stack Overflow thread devoted to just about every single code example and paragraph in the book, because no one has any idea what he's talking about. And even the JavaScript gurus on SO can't figure out what he's actually trying to say a good percentage of the time.

I'm sure it would be a great book if I were already pretty good at JavaScript, but as a first book it's just awful. I had much better luck with a HeadFirst book that covered JavaScript, even though that is a little too dumbed down at times. I was then able to then go back and have a much better appreciation of what Crockford was trying to say.

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Your second paragraph is nonsense. Any JS expert should be able to understand every point made in that book, by the very definition of expert.

Your third paragraph is completely sensible however. The Good Parts is horrible if you're a beginner programmer, and I'd definitely recommend against it. But if you have a CS degree or years of programming experience, it should not cause you trouble - it's a great, terse intro to JS that'll get you up and running in no time.

The worst book to learn from is JavaScript: The Definitive Guide [1]. It's unnecessarily lengthy (1000+ pages!) and attempting to learn from that has dissuaded more colleagues from JS than I care to remember.

[1] http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596805531.do

http://stackoverflow.com/search?q=%5Bjavascript%5D+crockford

The introduction to the book tells you it's not for beginners but experienced programmers. So complaining that it's not a good first book is like complaining coffee makes for a terrible cup of tea.

For someone who has programmed in C, C++, C#, Java, Python, Ruby etc., it's the perfect book: it succinctly explains the good and unique parts of JS. It's actually a bit too long in my opinion, the railroad diagrams and syntax parts can be skipped by the target audience.

When I was learning JS last year, coming from a background using other languages (Python, Actionscript, Java), this was the first book I read. It helped me immensely. Obviously AS3 shares a LOT of DNA with JS, but Crockford's funnel paved the way. Certainly not the be-all-end-all, but for a book I was able to read in an afternoon, I give it high marks.

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