Human JavaScript
read.humanjavascript.com
Human JavaScript
1–10 of 43 posts
Re: Human JavaScript
#2I skimmed a few chapters and as someone who writes Javascript all day, this looks pretty good. I want to dig into it more.
But I'm going to be "that-guy" and say $39 is too much just to get the kindle/PDF version. I buy a ton of programming books and I tend to only fork that much over for authoritative paper textbooks on particular subjects. Rarely digital versions. Otherwise I'm all with Patrick McKenzie on charging more.
Re: Human JavaScript
#3I skimmed a few chapters and as someone who writes Javascript all day, this looks pretty good. I want to dig into it more. But I'm going to be "that-guy" and say $39 is too much just to get the kindle/PDF version. I buy a ton of programming books and I tend to only fork that much over for authoritative paper textbooks on particular subjects. Rarely digital versions. Otherwise I'm all with Patrick McKenzie on charging…
Yea I agree, since it's online for free I think it'd be better if they went the HumbleBundle route and allowed users to enter in a price.
Re: Human JavaScript
#4I skimmed a few chapters and as someone who writes Javascript all day, this looks pretty good. I want to dig into it more. But I'm going to be "that-guy" and say $39 is too much just to get the kindle/PDF version. I buy a ton of programming books and I tend to only fork that much over for authoritative paper textbooks on particular subjects. Rarely digital versions. Otherwise I'm all with Patrick McKenzie on charging…
Agreed, I don't have a problem buying digital books, but $39 is too much.
Re: Human JavaScript
#5Possibly slightly tangential. I am someone that has a basic understanding of JS. I don't code on a regular basis, just here and there. I'm fine with html and css, but I want to up my JS skills in a couple of specific areas. Specifically, I want to learn how to build apps that can leverage other APIs. say for example if I want to build a service that interacts with the gmail api. I can't seem to find any information anywhere that can help me do this. Every time I do a search for JS API, API, rest API or similar, all I get is results for how to build an API in your own app, which is not what I need.
Does your book have the content I need to learn how to use an API? If not -- does anyone have any suggestions as to where I can go to learn this?
Re: Human JavaScript
#6Possibly slightly tangential. I am someone that has a basic understanding of JS. I don't code on a regular basis, just here and there. I'm fine with html and css, but I want to up my JS skills in a couple of specific areas. Specifically, I want to learn how to build apps that can leverage other APIs. say for example if I want to build a service that interacts with the gmail api. I can't seem to find any information a…
There is a beta Javascript client library for the Gmail API [0]. If you are looking to interface with an API that doesn't provide a JS client, your best bet might be to just build yourself a simple client using jQuery to handle the HTTP communication (see, for example, jQuery.ajax [1] for making HTTP calls).
ETA: To elaborate a bit, "interfacing with an external API" is usually just a fancy way of saying, "making HTTP requests." In Javascript, this means using the XmlHttpRequest browser API, which people call AJAX because it sounds hip. You can use it directly, but jQuery gives some extremely convenient helper methods for easily composing requests. One thing to keep in mind is that if the API uses JSON, you will have to consider that the browser does not permit you to return JSON from a cross-domain request (which an external API call almost certainly is). There is a way to enable this using something called JSONP [2].
[0]: https://developers.google.com/api-client-library/javascript/...
[1]: https://api.jquery.com/jQuery.ajax/
[2]: http://json-p.org/
Re: Human JavaScript
#7In the 'Writing code for humans.' section are the first three code examples meant to do the same thing? The first and third check whether the array contains 'hello' but the second does the opposite.
Re: Human JavaScript
#8Possibly slightly tangential. I am someone that has a basic understanding of JS. I don't code on a regular basis, just here and there. I'm fine with html and css, but I want to up my JS skills in a couple of specific areas. Specifically, I want to learn how to build apps that can leverage other APIs. say for example if I want to build a service that interacts with the gmail api. I can't seem to find any information a…
Henrik's book here can definitely help you.
But just to add my 2 cents for working with API's specifically - on the server side - a good start might be to play around with Node and CouchDB. Try building a basic app.
Couch is a database with an HTTP API out of the box, so if you can get the hang of it's basic operations then you will inherently have the fundamental knowledge needed to work with just about any other API.
Re: Human JavaScript
#9In the 'Writing code for humans.' section are the first three code examples meant to do the same thing? The first and third check whether the array contains 'hello' but the second does the opposite.
I guess it wasn't so clear after all. I think this makes the third example even stronger: use a method that is named what it does.
Re: Human JavaScript
#10I skimmed a few chapters and as someone who writes Javascript all day, this looks pretty good. I want to dig into it more. But I'm going to be "that-guy" and say $39 is too much just to get the kindle/PDF version. I buy a ton of programming books and I tend to only fork that much over for authoritative paper textbooks on particular subjects. Rarely digital versions. Otherwise I'm all with Patrick McKenzie on charging…
Agreed, I don't have a problem buying digital books, but $39 is too much.
I suspect that if Henrik is already giving away a digital version, with the paid version he's targeting high-rollers motivated to buy one out of a sense of gratitude/largesse. So a high price tag sort of makes sense.