This is very brief review of a marvellous book on JS, JavaScript: The Good Parts, by Douglas Crockford.

It’s a somewhat thin book, given that JS has quite a few features, but the author’s contention is that you should stick to a small subset of those features.

Some extracts from the Preface:

• This is not a reference book.
• It is not exhaustive…
• This is not a book for beginners.

These mean he’s not trying to teach JS, but rather to guide us readers as to what components of the language we should restrict ourselves to, that we may write programs of much higher quality than would otherwise be the case.

For your entertainment, he’s called the appendices (which are worth the price of the book):

• Awful Parts
• Bad Parts
• JSLint
• Syntax Diagrams
• JSON

Regrettably, JS has many parts which are very badly designed indeed, and the so author steers the reader away from those.

Highly recommended for all of us who sail on the JS Titanic.