Axel Rauschmayer - Speaking JavaScript

Speaking JavaScript

Axel Rauschmayer

Beijing Cambridge Farnham Kln Sebastopol Tokyo

Praise for Speaking JavaScript

A lot of people think JavaScript is simple and in many cases it is. But in its elegant simplicity lies a deeper functionality that if leveraged properly, can produce amazing results. Axels ability to distill this into an approachable reference will certainly help both aspiring and experienced developers achieve a better understanding of the language.

Rey Bango Advocate for cross-browser development, proponent of the open web, and lover of the JavaScript programming language

Axels writing style is succinct, to the point, yet at the same time extremely detailed. The many code examples make even the most complex topics in the book easy to understand.

Mathias Bynens Belgian web standards enthusiast who likes HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Unicode, performance, and security

" Speaking JavaScript is a modern, up to date book perfectly aimed at the existing experienced programmer ready to take a deep dive into JavaScript. Without wasting time on laborious explanations, Dr. Rauschmayer quickly cuts to the core of JavaScript and its various concepts and gets developers up to speed quickly with a language that seems intent on taking over the developer world.

Peter Cooper Publisher, entrepreneur, and co-organizer of Fluent Conference

If you have enjoyed Axels blog, then youll love this book. His book is filled with tons of bite-sized code snippets to aid in the learning process. If you want to dive deep and understand the ins and outs of JavaScript, then I highly recommend this book.

Elijah Manor Christian, family man, and front end web developer for Dave Ramsey; enjoys speaking, blogging, and tweeting

This book opens the door into the modern JavaScript community with just enough background and plenty of in-depth introduction to make it seem like youve been with the community from the start.

Mitch Pronschinske DZone Editor

After following Dr. Axel Rauschmayers work for a few years, I was delighted to learn that he was writing a book to share his deep expertise of JavaScript with those getting started with the language. Ive read many JavaScript books, but none that show the attention to detail and comprehensiveness of Speaking JS, without being boring or overwhelming. Ill be recommending this book for years to come.

Guillermo Rauch Speaker, creator of socket.io, mongoose, early Node.js contributor, author of Smashing Node.js, founder of LearnBoost/Cloudup (acq. by Wordpress in 2013), and Open Academy mentor

Due to its prevalence on the Web and other factors, JavaScript has become hard to avoid. That doesnt mean that it is well liked, though. With this book, Im hoping to convince you that, while you do have to accept a fair amount of quirks when using it, JavaScript is a decent language that makes you very productive and can be fun to program in.

Even though I have followed its development since its birth, it took me a long time to warm up to JavaScript. However, when I finally did, it turned out that my prior experience had already prepared me well, because I had worked with Scheme, Java (including GWT), Python, Perl, and Self (all of which have influenced JavaScript).

In 2010, I became aware of Node.js, which gave me hope that Id eventually be able to use JavaScript on both server and client. As a consequence, I switched to JavaScript as my primary programming language. While learning it, I started writing a book chronicling my discoveries. This is the book you are currently reading. On my blog, I published parts of the book and other material on JavaScript. That helped me in several ways: the positive reaction encouraged me to keep going and made writing this book less lonely; comments to blog posts gave me additional information and tips (as acknowledged everywhere in this book); and it made people aware of my work, which eventually led to OReilly publishing this book.

Therefore, this book has been over three years in the making. It has profited from this long gestation period, during which I continually refined its contents.Im glad that the book is finally finished and hope that people will find it useful for learning JavaScript. OReilly has agreed to make it available to be read online, for free, which should help make it accessible to a broad audience.