Sunday, December 8, 2013

Book Review: JavaScript: Pocket Reference 3rd Edition


- by 
David Flanagan

ToC
Paperback: 280 pages
Publisher: O'Reilly Media; Third Edition edition (April 25, 2012)

ISBN-10: 1449316859 | ISBN-13: 978-1449316853


This is not a javascript pocket reference. It's a guide and an excerpt of a complete reference. Recommended as long as you know what you are buying. 

I was hoping I can use this book as a quick reference to anything Javascript, but I didn't quite get that. A pocket reference should be more about coverage than explanation. This book explains some topics at length and doesn't care about many other topics. From a pocket reference you would expect lots of tables and pictures and charts covering the various methods, properties of built in types

This isn't a match to the 2nd edition of the same book, though the authors mentioned that this is intentional. I personally prefer a reference to be a reference first. What this book aims to be instead is a collection of some good portions from the book "6th edition of JavaScript: The Definitive Guide" by the same author.

However I do feel that, what it explains, it explains well. I am an experienced programmer. So, I skipped the basics and started straight from Ch 9. I found the concepts well explained and the examples quite useful. You can rely on this book for understanding the concepts that it covers. The author, no doubt, is one of the finest and you will know if you read the Definitive Guide.

Disclosure
I reviewed this book for O'Reilly's Blogger Review Program