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Comment by rauschma | Hacker News Reader

It’s certainly a good book. Can you explain why you think it’s better geared towards experienced programmers?

I previewed the table of contents of Speaking Javascript and it looks cool and comprehensive, but Eloquent Javscript discusses functional programming and only spends a little time on the bare basics.

I'm not saying that either book is better. In my opinion Eloquent is for more advanced folks, while Speaking might be geared towards beginning programmers.

I have to agree with this. I've worked with JavaScript in previous jobs but never took the time to really dig into the language and learn it in and out. I just applied my knowledge of other languages and looked things up when I needed to.

I'm working through Eloquent JavaScript (v1) right now and I'm on the chapter dealing with functional programming. Even with the programming classes I've taken in college, I'm finding this chapter to be much more difficult than any of the ones before it. Maybe it's uncommon, but I was never shown this type of programming ever before. Even though I'm progressing through it at a painstakingly slow pace, it's starting to make sense. But for someone who looked at EJS as their first programming book? I can understand why they may quit altogether.

Have you ever seen Underscore.js? It's a javascript toolkit for solving problems in a functional manner.

If you are interested in learning more, the video below walks through examples.

http://youtu.be/tbt36MvV6qQ

I've briefly looked at it in the past but not in much detail. Thanks for the video. I'll have to check it out.

Note that the basics only seem simple. Speaking JS covers them, but also (as optional reading) exposes many of the mechanisms behind them. For example: [1].

The book explains the complete language. I consider functional programming more of a (fascinating and important!) meta-topic; worthy even of dedicated books [2] and beyond the scope of Speaking JS.

[1] http://speakingjs.com/es5/ch18.html#_array_indices_in_detail

[2] “Functional JavaScript” by Michael Fogus. http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920028857.do

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