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Douglas Crockford, Yahoo!’s resident JavaScript guru and the developer of JSON, has provided a much-needed service in a three-part lecture series on the language. JavaScript is reportedly the second-fastest growing language to Ruby and has enjoyed a renaissance because of Ajax and rich Internet applications. JavaScript has always suffered from its unfortunate (and inaccurate) name, but it also suffers because of poor and outdated documentation and (general) lack of program comments or obfuscation to “minifying” to keep transferred script sizes small.
The first part in the lecture series (111 minutes) covers the basics of the language, its history and quirks:
The second part places JavaScript and its development in relation to the DOM and browser evolution (77 min):
Then, the third part covers more advanced language topics such as debugging, patterns and the interesting alternative to traditional object classing using prototypal inheritance (67 min):
Crockford is also the developer of the JSLint code-checking utility and has a Web site chocked full of other tips and aids, including a very good set of JS coding standards. I highly recommend you find the three or four hours necessary to give these tutorials your undivided attention.
Crockford is generally disparaging about the state of most JavaScript books, though he does recommend the fifth edition of Dave Flanagan’s well-known JavaScript: The Definitive Guide. I know Doug has a real job, but all of us can hope he personally takes up the challenge of finally writing the definitive JavaScript guide. Crockford is definitely the guy to do it.
Because of the excellence of this series, it gets a J & D award.
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An AI3 Jewels & Doubloon Winner |
[...] Open source projects are often notorious for poor, even non-existent, documentation. (I very much like Mike Pope’s statement, “If it isn’t documented, it doesn’t exist.”) But the documentation curse is magnified for JavaScript . As Doug Crockford notes, the general state of standard language documentaton and guide books is poor. Developers also often learn from others’ code examples, and there is much in the way of JavaScript snippets, especially historical, that is atrocious. Even widely adopted frameworks, such as Prototype, have for years been nearly undocumented, a shortcoming now being addressed. Rarely (in fact I know of none for major open source packages) does there exist UML class or package diagrams for larger JS apps or frameworks. And, because much JavaScript is communicated to the browser as server-side scripts, embedded code comments are of generally poor quality or totally non-existent. All of these factors translate into the general absence of APIs for larger apps (though most of the leading frameworks and libraries such as Prototype, YUI and Dojo are now beginning to provide professional documentation). [...]