"Kyle Simpson8 months ago Report Abuse I can assure you, my goal of splitting up the content into a book series had ZERO to do with making more money. It's actually quite the opposite. One of the things I hate the most about tech books is that I spend $35-50 on a big book of which there's only a few chapters I actually care about. I almost never read a whole book.
I decided when I wrote this content that I'd make each logical chunk of content available separately, which means that you can buy only the stuff that you actually care about. This COULD quite likely mean that I make a lot less money in the overall picture, because there will be plenty of people who don't buy all the books, or even not enough of them that would have generated the same income as a single book would have.
This places you, the reader, more in control, not only of what you buy and own, but more deeply of what you spend your money on compared to the content you get. Rather than being about me greedily making more money, it rather downgrades my ability to make bigger chunks of money per copy for the majority of people who (like me) only want/need part of the content.
With regards to this content being "pointless", that seems quite a spurious and unsubstantiated claim. Pointless to you? Perhaps. But I feel quite certain there's a lot of content in there (like block scoping, etc) that most developers (and perhaps even you) aren't fully aware of. If you're already a JS expert (even on all the new ES6 stuff coming), then you probably do know JS and I'm not sure why you bought the book.
The spirit of the whole series (given the title) is to get us all (myself included) to admit how we don't fully know JS and how we need to dig deeper than we have before. If that's lost on you, I'm sorry.
One last comment: these books are all available fully for free to read here: http://YouDontKnowJS.com In addition, Amazon's site makes preview snippets of the book available to read for free so you can get an idea of what you're buying. It's a shame you apparently didn't read the content/previews before buying, you could have saved your $5-7 (at least it wasn't $35-50)."