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How to Become a Great JavaScript Developer

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Re: How to Become a Great JavaScript Developer

#52

Post by mightybyte »

moron4hire wrote: post #29
jackweirdy wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say "Books are a waste of time" but all your explanation says is "Books can be bad". That's not the same thing.

:| Because there is no objective way to evaluate the quality of a book before reading it, and because any useful information in most of the few good technical books is of limited lifespan, books are a waste of time. It's not just that books can be bad. It's that most books are bad, and having to wade through them is what makes them a waste of time.

So don't wade through random books. Get recommendations from other people and read only the ones that are highly recommended.

Here are a few books that I see at the top of the lists almost every time this topic comes up:

The Mythical Man-Month

The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master

Code Complete

Re: How to Become a Great JavaScript Developer

#53

Post by jashkenas »

anc84 wrote: post #46
gluelogic wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for this link. I will be reading it for sure. I also stumbled on the annotated source of Underscore.js a few days ago ( http://underscorejs.org/docs/underscore.html ). Would love any more stuff like this that anyone knows of.

Why oh why are those not comments within the source file? It would help me so much to have comments like those in software... Generally I think that a linear step-by-step description is often not the best way though, often you would have to explain concepts or the bigger picture first.

You're in luck. Those comments certainly are within the source file:

http://underscorejs.org/underscore.js

Re: How to Become a Great JavaScript Developer

#54

Post by 91bananas »

murbard2 wrote: post #12

Missing advice: learn to program well in a few well designed programming language. JavaScript was designed in 10 days and the main reason it still exists today is incredibly strong path dependence. There's nothing wrong with wanting to become a great JavaScript developer, but one needs to become a great developer first, and JavaScript just isn't conducive to that.

I personally am so over this argument. Sure, that is roughly a fact about the time in which it was designed... but that was 20 years ago. Since then there has been a team of some of the best programmers in the world maintaining and advancing the language.

Re: How to Become a Great JavaScript Developer

#55

Post by JustSomeNobody »

moron4hire wrote: post #9

Books are a waste of time. Most of them are garbage to begin with, and most of them are practically obsolete by the time they are published. Few have any lasting staying power. Besides, nobody ordained the author to be an authority on the subject. He was just a guy who wrote a book. It's zero indication of the quality of the content. Just write code. Practice, practice, practice.

If one has knowledge others can benefit from, one doesn't need to be "ordained ... an authority" to write about it.

If one cannot find a mentor to tell you this is good Javascript and this is bad Javascript, then books can fill that void.

Writing code without any guidance can only get a developer so far. He needs examples of good solid idiomatic code to progress. A good book, often by "just a guy", can provide that.

Re: How to Become a Great JavaScript Developer

#57

Post by mdup »

darby2000 wrote: post #33

Just adding my two cents. Wanna be a good JS dev? Go play around with a lisp. Like Clojure for a month or two. Get comfortable with functional programming. Then come back to JS. So many people come from a OOP to JS and they have a bad time with it. JS is more like a lisp with C syntax than it is a traditional OO language. Learning Clojure, not only improved my JS abilities, but just my over all programming maturity.…

Indeed. Personally I'm used to think in functional ways: map, fold, function composition, immutability... I'd like to be good at Haskell but I'm always having lots of pain dealing with it, because I never see the end of the learning curve.

I've found JS to be a nice middle land where I can get productive functionally without too much hassle. It's like a good friend who understands my way of thinking without being in the way too much. Underscore.js hits the sweet spot for me: _.chain(...).map(...).filter(...).value() is verbose but surprinsingly readable. I'm not a fan of Python map() syntactically, and I absolutely hate C++11's std::transform.

Re: How to Become a Great JavaScript Developer

#60

Post by a3n »

wlesieutre wrote: post #25
mhd wrote: post #23

If you're already a decent enough developer and just need to get your grips on JavaScript, I'd say that most books listed aren't that useful. A decent enough online reference will get you going and after that you'll have to consider that JS is a pretty large dung heap by now where you probably won't get a lot of mileage out of inhaling dust from the crusty parts. Unless you're an enterprise developer tasked with main…

For the decent developers picking up Javascript, http://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/javascript/ is hard to beat. All the basic syntax and language features in one page without trying to explain to you what a while loop does.

This made me gag, years ago:

  // Statements can be terminated by ;
  doStuff();
  
  // ... but they don't have to be, as semicolons are automatically inserted
  // wherever there's a newline, except in certain cases.
  doStuff()
  
  // Because those cases can cause unexpected results, we'll keep on using
  // semicolons in this guide.
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