Unknown JavaScript Books
A look at some more of the unknown JavaScript books in the wild
A common reoccurring question on around the web is “which book should I get”? The answer is always the same old top 10 from Amazon with affiliate links like JavaScript: The Good Parts, JavaScript: The Definitive Guide and Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja.
While these are good books, and even JavaScript: The Good Parts is still relevant today, even if we’ve gotten some extra syntax sugar in the newer editions of ECMAScript the ideas these books present are still solid.
However, we wanted to showcase some of the lesser known contenders, now for full disclosure the above links were affiliate links with Amazon, but the links below will not be and in no shape or form will we benefit on you checking them out, in-fact all the books are available for free online.
The JavaScript Way
The JavaScript Way by Baptiste Pesquet is aimed at beginners, it doesn’t really even acknowledge that ECMAScript 5 ever existed which is refreshing. It goes through the basics of the language, introduces object oriented and functional programming and some basic DOM concepts.
Currently the book is marked as around half way finished, the chapters yet to be written seem to be on Node but the chapters that are there are pretty solid. Since it’s a work in progress the book is available as pay what you want on Leanpub, the source book is also available via GitHub.
All in all, it’s a solid introduction for someone who isn’t already a developer.
Understanding ECMAScript 6
Understanding ECMAScript 6 by Nicholas C. Zakas is essentially an in-depth feature tour for JavaScript developers on the new features in ECMAScript 6 and ECMAScript 7 (the amount of features in introduced ECMAScript 7 is tiny, they’re mentioned in the appendix).
It’s a fairly un-biased in its presentation and just presents the features along with a usage example.
It’s available for both free online reading and purchase via Leanpub.
Exploring ES6
Exploring ES6 by Axel Rauschmayer is another feature tour of ECMAScript 6. It’s like Understanding ECMAScript 6 but is at-least worth a skim even if you’ve already read the other one.
Again it’s fairly unbiased, available for digital purchase on Leanpub or online reading via it’s website.
Both are good, in this case it just comes down to us reading Understanding ECMAScript 6 first then skimming Exploring ES6.
Learning JavaScript Design Patterns
Learning JavaScript Patterns by Addy Osmani seems to be aimed at novice developers, it’s essentially an adaptation of the patterns presented in Gang of Four’s Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software into JavaScript, with the addition of some language specific patterns.
The book is available for purchase via O’Reilly or can be viewed from via the authors website.
Got a book suggestion? Drop a tweet Hash Array, it has to be freely available online however.
