300 Books Every JavaScript Developer Must Read In 2017
Published in
3 min readDec 29, 2016
This year I set out to read 300 programming books as a way to hone my skills and level up as a developer. Quite ambitious, yes, but some of the best developers I know are always reading, true story.
I loaded up my Amazon cart and got to work.
Here are my reviews of each book, and why I think you should read them too.
- Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja — John Resig, Bear Bibeault, Josip Maras. This book features a Samurai on the cover and a phenomenal collection of lesser-known JavaScript features. Learn the ins and outs of regular expressions, getters, and all the DOM API bits you wish you knew during your internship before you wrote that tooltip module from scratch.
- Beautiful JavaScript: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think — Anton Kovalyov & Various Others. A collection of short essays written by leading JavaScript developers on topics ranging from code cleanup to satire. A lighter book full of wisdom for your morning coffee.
- If Hemingway Wrote JavaScript — Angus Croll. A truly charming take on fancy-lookin’ JavaScript as if it were written by some of history’s most famous authors and poets. Trick yourself into learning how the Function constructor works while reading Lewis Carroll’s theoretical attempt at generating prime numbers.
- Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming — Peter Seibel. An interview-style glimpse into the minds of some of the most famous programmers in history. Learn about how even the pro-est of pros still use print statements to debug their code.
- Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs — Harold Abelson, Gerald Jay Sussman, Julie Sussman. The single best piece of literature you can read if you want to understand why some programs you write just feel “better” than others. Build a solid intuition for abstraction, and learn the magic behind some of your favorite modern-day software patterns.
- Okay so it’s December 29th and I’m still grinding through SICP, so I haven’t really hit the rest of my reading list. I’m still hoping I can finish all 300 books in the next 48 hours and update this list accordingly — wish me luck!
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