LinLog

I've been writing software for a living for the last 15 years.  I've been doing mostly full-stack web development for nine of those.  That means I've written my fair share of JavaScript code.  But you know what?  It turns out I really don't know JS.  I thought I did.  But I don't.

I reached this conclusion after reading the first two and a half of the six books in Kyle Simpson's You Don't Know JS series.  Normally, I'd wait until I was finished with the series to blog about it, but seriously, this is good stuff.  If you think you have a decent grasp of JavaScript, you should read this to test your mettle.

Forget the W3Schools tutorials or jQuery guides you might have read to learn JavaScript in the first place.  This is way beyond that.  The goal of the You Don't Know JS series is not to teach you "how to code JavaScript" but rather to help you master JavaScript.  It's a deep-dive into the guts of JavaScript - not the subset most of us are used to, but what's actually spelled out in the ECMAScript specifications. 

The beautiful thing about this series is that it's not about expanding your catalog of technical tricks.  Most of it (well, of the 2.5 books I've read so far, anyway) is about understanding the fundamentals in a deep way.  For example, going beyond "oh, this in JavaScript is weird" and actually understanding the rules behind how the dynamic binding of this works and how it differs from the lexical scope used for everything else.  Things like that are easy to gloss over.  After all, you don't really need to know the gory details of how this is bound in order to write code and be productive.  But these kinds of things really are important.  They're the difference between "knowing" JavaScript and knowing JavaScript. 

To put it another way, there's more to the craft of building software than just "getting the job done".  For some people, just "getting it done" is sufficient - and that's fine: they're satisfied to remain journeymen.  But for some people, that's not enough - they want to be master craftsmen.  This series is for them.