JavaScript: The Good Parts - book review

I just finished reading Douglas Crockford's JavaScript: The Good Parts and it only took me a few hours to go through it this weekend. This is a short and delightful read. The book has not been released in print yet and I read it via O'Reilly's Safari Bookshelf, which will be the subject of a future post by itself.

Update: The book became available almost at the same time I posted this review.

In its 170 pages the book describes not only the HOWs but, most importantly, the WHYs of the JavaScript language. Douglas Crockford is known for his great contributions for JavaScript development, including JSON, JSLint. JSMin, and several programming patterns and practices.

In this book, Douglas explains JavaScript and how it differs from other popular object oriented programming language. Special attention is given to JavaScript's inheritance model and scoping rules.

Crockford doesn't limit the coverage to what is considered good in the language design. He also sticks his finger at the problems in the language and what he considers (justifiably) bad language design and missing features. A lot of attention is also given to common sources of bugs and how to avoid them.

This is such an easy and valuable read that I have to recommend it to anyone trying to produce solid and maintainable JavaScript code.