First jquery, then React, now this book reaches a new version. Good times for JS
Eloquent JavaScript 4th edition (2024)
161–170 of 249 posts
Re: Eloquent JavaScript 4th edition (2024)
#162I wonder if such high quality free books are already fed to LLMs during training?
They're open source and easily accessible, so I would practically guarantee some/most of them are using it and other open source books.
Given so many are just on Github and very well known/linked-to I doubt they even put any special effort into getting these specific resources.
Re: Eloquent JavaScript 4th edition (2024)
#163does anyone know where can i get the list of changes compared with the previous edition?
From a comment above thread, here's the diff of current state against the 3rd edition: https://github.com/marijnh/Eloquent-JavaScript/compare/f8f00...
Re: Eloquent JavaScript 4th edition (2024)
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
I get so jealous that people can absorb information via books as an adult. I can read the same chapter a hundred times and nothing sinks in. I know this is off topic but do you, or anyone passing, have a system or tips for how y'all do this? I've got so many programming books but they only collect dust after I read through them without benefit.
Everyone has different learning styles. I retain maybe 90% of what I read, but only 10% of what I hear. So videos and any audio are the worst formats for me to learn anything. The first step is figuring out what your learning style is.
This is debunked to some extent. Veritasium made a good video about it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhgwIhB58PA
Personally I find a multi-pronged approach is necessary to really learn anything. Read it. Read it again. Visual guides are helpful. Work some examples. Make some mistakes, debug them, find the corner cases, write tests. Eventually when I've poked around the material for a while it starts to bed in.
Three months later it's forgotten, but when I learn it the next time I move a lot faster!
Re: Eloquent JavaScript 4th edition (2024)
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a great explanation, but I've never heard the term 'binding' used to describe variables. It's usually reserved to function binding or bridge APIs like the DOM. The tricky thing is that "boxes" are the right abstraction for primitive values. After that you need to explain how references work, and that's pretty much the same 'tentacle' concept. This method spares the reader one step, but might cause confusion once…
"Binding" is used thousands of times in the language standard, including for variables: https://tc39.es/ecma262/#sec-variable-statement -- that's my point, that this book is precise while being approachable to beginners. And I dispute the claim that "boxes" are the right abstraction for anything in JS. (Boxes may work for primitive values, but nothing further.) Directly seeing names as bindings ("tentacles") not only…
I meant in the context of writing code - you’ll never hear anyone refer to their “bindings”.
It breaks down with the simple `let a = 22; let b = a` example where the tentacle/binding metaphor can lead to wrong intuition of why a change to the value of a is not reflected in b.
Re: Eloquent JavaScript 4th edition (2024)
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Binding" is used thousands of times in the language standard, including for variables: https://tc39.es/ecma262/#sec-variable-statement -- that's my point, that this book is precise while being approachable to beginners. And I dispute the claim that "boxes" are the right abstraction for anything in JS. (Boxes may work for primitive values, but nothing further.) Directly seeing names as bindings ("tentacles") not only…
I meant in the context of writing code - you’ll never hear anyone refer to their “bindings”. It breaks down with the simple `let a = 22; let b = a` example where the tentacle/binding metaphor can lead to wrong intuition of why a change to the value of a is not reflected in b .
You're struggling due to a conflation of two concepts.
Binding refers to associating a name with a value. Assignment is a case of binding, but not the only one; two other examples are positional arguments in a function signature, and ESM imports. A binding can be mutable (let assignment, function arguments) or immutable (const assignment, ESM import).
Value mutability is orthogonal. You can mutably bind a primitive value as "let a = 22" and then mutate the binding via reassignment, but you can't mutate the value itself; you can immutably bind a reference value as "const b = {}" and mutate the referenced object via property access, but you can't mutate the binding.
I refer to bindings all the time, where it's useful to be clear in meaning. I also make sure to introduce the concept to mentees who aren't already familiar with it, and by all reports thus far it's proven as valuable an abstraction for them as it did for me when I first learned of it.
Re: Eloquent JavaScript 4th edition (2024)
#167Someone asked about integer support in JavaScript. JS now supports BigInt! >2**57 144115188075855870 >2n**57n 144115188075855872n
And in some JavaScript engines (eg V8) bigint multiplication is asymptotically fast, unlike say the default CPython. It’s a very pleasant surprise if you happen to be a number theorist (say).
How do you mean? CPython uses karatsuba's for large numbers which should be asymptotically fast
https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/d864b0094f9875c5613cb...
Re: Eloquent JavaScript 4th edition (2024)
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
I get so jealous that people can absorb information via books as an adult. I can read the same chapter a hundred times and nothing sinks in. I know this is off topic but do you, or anyone passing, have a system or tips for how y'all do this? I've got so many programming books but they only collect dust after I read through them without benefit.
Not the original poster, but I learn best reading textbooks cover-to-cover. A couple things that help me: 1) I buy physical textbooks and absolutely destroy them with notes in the margins, highlighting, etc. It helps me to interact with the material instead of letting it wash over me, which means I'm both thinking about it more in-depth and as side effect I'm less bored. Otherwise I'll fall asleep and won't learn any…
I was a bit like you, read everything cover to cover, until i read Natsume Soseki’s Kusamakura, in which he says:
“Reading a book from the beginning to the end is like insisting on marrying every woman (or man) you fall in love with.”
And that opened my eyes and now i no longer feel in debt to the book or the author :)
Re: Eloquent JavaScript 4th edition (2024)
#169This is, in my opinion, the book to use to learn JavaScript at more than a surface level. The only other materials I recommend as much (but for a different level of learner) are the “You don’t know JavaScript” in-depth book series. In 2015, I was consulting for a distance learning program, administered by a major California University, that wanted to replace their current textbook (one of those “Head First” O’Reilly…
One hundred percent agree on both this book and the “You don’t know JavaScript”. Both are free (search Kyle Simpson GitHub). I ended up buying the YDKJ first edition paperbacks but see the second edition of all of them are done or a work in progress. EJs is the one I tell my students to start with as IMO is more of a programming book that just happens to us JS. I can tell the ones that read it (it’s optional) and the…
> Note the YDKJ books can come off as very ‘only my opinion is the right one’ kind of like JS the good parts
I got the same feeling and it's very off-putting. KS seems like a dick. It's ironic that so much of his dickishness seems to be reacting against what he takes as Doug Crockford's dickishness. Ah the irony.
Re: Eloquent JavaScript 4th edition (2024)
#170For those that don't know the author, Marijn Haverbeke is the creator of CodeMirror (code editor) and later ProseMirror (text editor). https://codemirror.net/ https://prosemirror.net/
I'll always know him as the author of Postmodern, an impressive CL library for PostgreSQL: https://marijnhaverbeke.nl/postmodern/