Over the weekend I finished reading Douglas Crockford‘s JavaScript: The Good Parts.
This book spent quite some time on my to-read list and I am really happy to have finally read it. I now feel that I really know how to use closures in Javascript, and Mr. Crockford has inspired me with his use of functions as values, and creating functions that return functions or objects, maintaining access to local variables within a closure, is genius.
I found myself leaning heavily on my previous knowledge to understand The Good Parts, making it, as it says in the preface, not a book for beginners. I can imagine that the Regular Expressions chapter might be tough without a pre-existing understanding of regular expressions, however, that’s easy to obtain at regular-expressions.info.
After reading The Good Parts I’m really excited to work on some Javascript that I’m going to be refactoring and improving over the next few weeks. I can apply the some of principles contained here to write smaller, faster, and easier to maintain Javascript, something that is always my goal.