So, in my quest to rid myself of cowboy coding tendencies, I've decided that I might try to.. learn a little more. I figure that keeping a book blog will be helpful to document my cursory thoughts and impressions and to be able to refer back to them later.
Secrets Of The JavaScript Ninja is written primarily by John Resig. You may recognize the name. He's the guy who created jQuery. Maybe you've heard of it. He also works at Khan Academy (ugh), and created Processing.js - which I personally view as a catastrophic failure, though that may simply be because he pretty much abandoned it. When I originally attempted to use Processing.js for a project, I was mostly familiar with Java and didn't have much understanding of the limitations and differences of JS running on a browser - thus ditching it half-way through, though now that I think about it, I probably could've finished if I weren't so quick to jump back to what was familiar. All that aside, he also studies Ukiyo-e and is probably a weebo.
So, why JavaScript? If you've been paying attention, you likely know that JavaScript is important, now moreso than ever. Web applications are more robust and interactive, and JS is no longer even limited to browsers. Rhino, V8 and Node.js have JS being used as a backend language, and recently it has even started to be used for native mobile app development.
Basically, it's fucking everywhere, and the author seems to think that pretty much everyone fucking sucks at writing it. He talks about how to best learn to not suck at it in Chapter 1, and concludes the intro with various notes, roadmaps, who the book is for, etc.
Who is the book for? Not for rank novices, but pretty much everyone else can benefit.
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