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Eloquent JavaScript 4th edition (2024)

eloquentjavascript.net

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Re: Eloquent JavaScript 4th edition (2024)

#3

Post by msoad »

This is the book that helped me really understand JavaScript. Really great content and I can't thank Marjin enough for putting this out there for free.

Also how this person is so productive? I really would love to read on how he manages his time and priorities.

Re: Eloquent JavaScript 4th edition (2024)

#4

Post by dcre »

This is my favorite book about JS, and I always recommend it to people. It occurs to me for the first time that the lack of TypeScript might be a problem, because if I’m making recommendations to someone learning, I am definitely going to recommend they write TS instead of JS. On the other hand it may actually be helpful to learn the concepts in this book without the additional syntax overhead of type annotations, plus the more webby content doesn’t really have much to do with types anyway.

Re: Eloquent JavaScript 4th edition (2024)

#5

Post by OmarShehata »

dcre wrote: post #4

This is my favorite book about JS, and I always recommend it to people. It occurs to me for the first time that the lack of TypeScript might be a problem, because if I’m making recommendations to someone learning, I am definitely going to recommend they write TS instead of JS. On the other hand it may actually be helpful to learn the concepts in this book without the additional syntax overhead of type annotations, pl…

I very much concur that it is better NOT to introduce TS when explaining JS fundamentals. I've seen smart engineers with a C++ background get tripped up on and very confused working with TS, because it's not clear to them what concepts are "language fundamentals" and what concepts are "the TS transpiler".

(Like expecting that just because you declared something as type X, that it guarantees at runtime it will always be type X, but it won't. You may get data from an API that _says_ it returns type X but the contents don't match. That can be valid code that compiles and has weird runtime behavior)

Re: Eloquent JavaScript 4th edition (2024)

#7

Post by diggan »

dcre wrote: post #4

This is my favorite book about JS, and I always recommend it to people. It occurs to me for the first time that the lack of TypeScript might be a problem, because if I’m making recommendations to someone learning, I am definitely going to recommend they write TS instead of JS. On the other hand it may actually be helpful to learn the concepts in this book without the additional syntax overhead of type annotations, pl…

> I am definitely going to recommend they write TS instead of JS

Why is that? If you want them to learn JS, teach/recommend them to learn JS?

Compile-to-JavaScript languages come and go, but JavaScript has remained. First learning vanilla JavaScript makes sense, and then add TS on top if you really have to. At the very least they'll be prepared for when TypeScript goes out of favor.

Re: Eloquent JavaScript 4th edition (2024)

#8

Post by Quothling »

msoad wrote: post #3

This is the book that helped me really understand JavaScript. Really great content and I can't thank Marjin enough for putting this out there for free. Also how this person is so productive? I really would love to read on how he manages his time and priorities.

[flagged]

Re: Eloquent JavaScript 4th edition (2024)

#10

Post by DarkNova6 »

OmarShehata wrote: post #5
dcre wrote: post #4

This is my favorite book about JS, and I always recommend it to people. It occurs to me for the first time that the lack of TypeScript might be a problem, because if I’m making recommendations to someone learning, I am definitely going to recommend they write TS instead of JS. On the other hand it may actually be helpful to learn the concepts in this book without the additional syntax overhead of type annotations, pl…

I very much concur that it is better NOT to introduce TS when explaining JS fundamentals. I've seen smart engineers with a C++ background get tripped up on and very confused working with TS, because it's not clear to them what concepts are "language fundamentals" and what concepts are "the TS transpiler". (Like expecting that just because you declared something as type X, that it guarantees at runtime it will always…

What helped me understand the Runtime behaviour of TS is to understand that TS doesn't actually have strong typing. If it was named "LintScript", its name would be much closer to the truth.
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