The Best Books for Learning JavaScript

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JavaScript: The Good Parts

Douglas Crockford is one of the most prominent experts in the field of JavaScript by many in the development community and his book JavaScript: The Good Parts is an excellent addition to any JavaScript developers library. The book goes over some of the best parts of the JavaScript language and is exceptionally well written.

With an average review of 4.4 out of 5 stars on Amazon, this is definitely a safe purchase for those wanting to master the art of JavaScript programming and create absolutely beautiful software systems. This book coupled with the next book, JavaScript: The Definitive Guide are a perfect combination and I would highly recommend both books in conjunction to anyone wishing to pick the language up.

JavaScript: The Definitive Guide: Activate Your Web Pages

JavaScript: The Definitive Guide goes in depth on some of the newer aspects of the language and covers things such as HTML5 as well as ECMAScript 5. It is a monster of a book packed full of educational material and covers essentially everything that can possibly be covered about the JavaScript programming language.

It’s held in high reverence and the creator of JavaScript himself has deemed the book to be ‘a must-have reference for expert JavaScript programmers…well-organized and detailed’. As far as recommendations go, it can’t really get much better than that.

The Principles of Object-Oriented JavaScript

The Principles of Object-Oriented JavaScript covers how you can write well structured object-oriented JavaScript using the inbuilt features of the language.

The book covers concepts such as primitive and reference types, functions, understanding object, constructors and prototypes, inheritance and finally object patterns and has received a fantastic reception from the community. It has gathered over 120 reviews on Amazon and averaged an exceptional 4.8 stars out of 5.

This is yet another exceptional addition to any JavaScript developers book collection.

JavaScript Patterns

JavaScript Patterns by Stoyan Stefanov goes a step further than the previous books and instead of covering the intricacies of the JavaScript language, it takes a step back and covers a number of different programming patterns you can employ when implementing your JavaScript based systems.

It explores useful habits for writing high-quality JavaScript code, the different ways to define functions within JavaScript, the options available for code reuse and inheritance in JavaScript and a hell of a lot more.

You Don’t Know JS: ES6 & Beyond