Learning Node I'll briefly delve into things that stood out to me in each chapter of the book. Chapter 1 – Reading this chapter is a must if you don't understand the asynchronous nature of Node. It also covers building it from source for Linux, and using WebMatrix to develop and run Node applications with IIS. Chapter 2 – Shows how to use command line REPL (read-eval-print loop) to quickly test code, inspect objects, and as an editor.
Imagine that! Chapter 3 – Covers the Node core objects and modules. Chapter 4 – Covers the Node module system. Chapter 5 – Delves deeper into the asynchronous nature of Node, covering control flow, exception handling, and asynchronous patterns. Chapters 6, 7, 8 – Discuss web development middleware and frameworks such as Connect and Express, and templating modules that work in tandem with Express, such as EJS and Jade. Chapter 12 – Discusses manipulating PDF by executing external tools such as PDF Toolkit, creating drawings using the canvas module, and streaming videos. JavaScript Cookbook The first few chapters of the book start of by explaining the basics of the Javascript language, providing insights and tips around working with strings, numbers, arrays, loops, functions, events etc...
A seasoned Javascript programmer will probably already be familiar with most of this functionality, but I found it interesting enough to keep on reading these 'basic' chapters, because the author gives a good background explanation and points to more obscure or browser-specific problems that arise when using these concepts. The next few chapters go a little deeper into error handling, debugging, the different methods to accessing DOM elements, and adding interactive functionality to your webpages. The author took a very interesting approach with the chapter on interactive elements, by focusing highly on having the ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) attribute set baked in into the examples. JavaScript Patterns What's the best approach for developing an application with JavaScript? This book helps you answer that question with numerous JavaScript coding patterns and best practices.
If you're an experienced developer looking to solve problems related to objects, functions, inheritance, and other language-specific categories, the abstractions and code templates in this guide are ideal—whether you're using JavaScript to write a client-side, server-side, or desktop application. Written by JavaScript expert Stoyan Stefanov—Senior Yahoo!
Technical and architect of YSlow 2.0, the web page performance optimization tool—JavaScript Patterns includes practical advice for implementing each pattern discussed, along with several hands-on examples. You'll also learn about anti-patterns: common programming approaches that cause more problems than they solve. JavaScript: The Good Parts The animal on the cover of JavaScript: The Good Parts is a Plain Tiger butterfly (Danaus chrysippus).Outside of Asia, the insect is also known as the African Monarch. It is a medium-size butterfly characterized by bright orange wings with six black spots and alternating black-and-white stripes. Its striking looks have been noted for millennia by scientists and artists. The writer Vladimir Nabokov--who was also a noted lepidopterist--had admiring words for the butterfly in an otherwise scathing New York Times book review of Alice Ford's Audubon's Butterflies, Moths, and Other Studies (The Studio Publications).
In the book, Ford labels drawings made previous to and during Audubon's time in the 19th century as "scientifi-cally [sic] unsophisticated. " In response to Ford, Nabokov writes, "The unsophistication is all her own. While the Plain Tiger's beauty is part of its charm, its looks can also be deadly. The cover image is from Dover's Animals. HTML5 and JavaScript Web Apps The book is a great high level overview of front-end web application development. It wanders between desktop and mobile ideas, talks about popular frameworks, discusses some of the cooler html5 features, and generally informs the reader of what's out there. It even includes some sample code to demonstrate implementation.
But it really is quite lean. The sample code is hardly more than you'd find if you did a google search for the subject, and doesn't show anything very insightful. I wasn't familiar with 2 or 3 of the things mentioned in the book and after reading it, I can say I am still just as unfamiliar. It reads more like a few blog posts with a bunch of links to different frameworks than it does like a technical book. It never really gave me insight into anything. Testable JavaScript I cannot start the analysis of the book without saying that is really more about testing and software engineering good rules to get a nice readable, maintainable, efficient, clear, reusable and high quality code. The language is really a second layer. What you will learn the first chapters is about how you could (SHOULD!) Improve your code and the author, Mark Ethan Trostler, is really clear on showing the reader how you reach the goal with the help of several tools specifically for JavaScript!
That's the JavaScript part which i was interested in as i come from the software development engineering world using Java as main language so i wanted to get some tips about what to use in the JavaScript case. Traversing the client side framework PhantomJS and the server side Jasmine, the author shape the testing world in JavaScript in a good, concise and clear sentences with the code samples as proof of concept. Selenium is great and powerful API client/server testing environment! JavaScript Enlightenment The code examples are mostly super short and to the point, which is great for many reasons, including the fact that they don't necessarily have to be run to be understood. It's helpful to experiment, of course, but if you have some solid experience and are able to focus on the code, this is the kind of book you can read away from a computer, which, as a programmer, can be a fun little break (how many coding books can you read in bed?).
The book is repetitive--that's one of its stated goals. The concepts introduced are dense and they bear repeating. The repetition is really helpful and not boring--it would maybe be boring if the information wasn't so profoundly helpful. I actually felt it wasn't repetitive enough, and reread most passages at least twice, but I'm like that. Some of the wording is a little goofy (the author seems to love using the word "grok"), and some of the code is a little less clear than it could be (so, so many "foos" and "bars") and there are some small errors.