Hacker News Reader

Comment by eddd | Hacker News Reader

I hate books with contents like: Variables and Assignment Values, Booleans, Numbers, Operators, Strings,Statements, Functios, Exception Handling, Strict Mode, Variable Scoping and losures, Objects and Constructors, Arrays etc... there are milions books like that. I require from book to introduce me into new language in a manner where i don't have to suffer due to going throught dry facts and definitions. Give me pure examples. I want to create something useful during lecture of book about programming.

View on HN

Give Underhanded JavaScript a try then. It teaches you how to be an arsehole JS developer :P - published today too (http://leanpub.com/underhandedjavascript/c/NackerHews)

The book is laid out by logical topics (on how to purposely write bad/underhanded code, followed by explanation on why/how they work) instead of keywords (such as IIFEs, automatic semicolon insertion, function calls etc)

disclaimer: I wrote it

EDIT: I skimmed through Speaking JavaScript. It's a bloody good book, much better than mine. You probably should read that

One more EDIT:

Since there was another thread which I gave a coupon for HNers, here's the link:

http://leanpub.com/underhandedjavascript/c/NackerHews

This book is too expensive. I would only buy it if I saw a physical copy and judged a few pages funny.

Agreed. Books that focus on teaching syntax and common use cases really fall flat for me. The best programming books teach you how to think in the syntax of the language. Eloquent Javascript [1] does a good job of that and is also free.

The best programming book at teaching a practical contemporary language in depth while teaching you to think with it is Metaprogramming Ruby. That's a great read for anyone considering writing a book to teach a programming language. And the best book I've ever read on thinking about programming comprehensively is SICP. Which again, I would recommend reading at least half of if you are going to write a book teaching a language.

1. http://eloquentjavascript.net/

Hey, I stumbled across a post of the author of eloquentjavascript that he's crowdfunding second edition of the book. My question is - how current is the first edition? Is it suitable to teach me JS, considering it's quite old? I'm not a good programmer. I know a bit of python, mainly for statistical tasks and some automation/scraping.

It's a great intro to Javascript. It's not going to teach you the most current webdev libraries but if you start with a strong foundation in Javascript (which you will get from Eloquent Javascript) you should be fine applying your knowledge to using popular libraries.

Thank you! Thanks to marijn too!

The second edition is partially online already at http://eloquentjavascript.net/2nd_edition/preview/

Even though it is about Scheme, the insights in SICP are invaluable for JavaScript programmers (the way I explain and visualize closures and environments are inspired by it). It’s one of the best programming books I’ve ever read.

Give my book a chance, it is complementary to both SICP and Eloquent JavaScript.

Sorry I don't mean to be overly dismissive. I'm taking a look right now. I do like that you include history & background. Also I like the addition of a style guide and a separate section on tools like modules & package managers.

You might like Javascript Allonge, a lot

https://leanpub.com/javascript-allonge/read

Personally, I love learning from books like this one and consider tutorial-style books a complete waste of my time. It's a matter of learning style, and the differences are fairly well understood. Look up deductive vs inductive teaching.

Teachers try to use both methods, but book authors don't have to. Readers are free to learn from any book that suits them.

If you’d take the time to read the free online copy (which OP links to) you’d see that there are plenty of “pure examples” in the book. In fact, there’s a code example for every two paragraphs of text, or so.

I agree. I enjoy weird quirky books that actually have a narrative and you build projects and learn the syntax while you are doing more interesting stuff.

However, I've read many books with tables of contents that look like that, yet they were actually pleasant to read and much more interesting than their contents implied.

I hate books with contents like that too - I've read about those things many times already and unless the language I'm currently learning really does something interesting in one of those areas reading whole paragraphs of text on them is just a waste of time. I'm recently learning Forth, and I really do appreciate more detailed explanations, because holy cow, that's some really crazy shit going on :) However, for languages and technologies closer to mainstream - or just similar to what I already know - I use these web sites for an intro:

http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Rosetta_Code

http://learnxinyminutes.com/

http://hyperpolyglot.org/

And then go straight to the most advanced books I can find. It saves me a lot of time and it's more fun than following yet another book structured in exactly the same way, with pages and pages of text about minor syntactical differences and rare interesting things buried deep inside the book.

I humbly disagree. Especially in the case of JavaScript it's a good idea to review JavaScript's specific perspective on functions and object but also variable scope. I personally found "JavaScript Enlightment" quite interesting in this respect.

Don’t judge a book by its TOC! I’d love to get your opinion once you have read or at least skimmed, say, chapter 1: http://speakingjs.com/es5/ch01.html

john resig- secrets of javascript ninja

absolutely the best

Reply on news.ycombinator.com