JavaScript is one of the most used programming languages on the planet. Like so many programmers, I knew a bit of pidgin JavaScript, and one day, I had to learn serious JavaScript in a hurry. But how?
There are any number of books that teach a little bit of JavaScript for casual web developers, but I already knew that much JavaScript. Flanagan's “Rhino book” was great in 1996, but now it burdens readers with too many accidents from the past. Crockford's JavaScript—The Good Parts was a wakeup call in 2008, but much of its message has been internalized in subsequent changes to the language. There are a number of books that bring old-style JavaScript programmers into the world of modern standards, but they assumed an amount of “classic” JavaScript that was out of my comfort zone.
Of course, the web is awash in JavaScript-themed blogs of varying quality, some accurate and many with a tenuous grasp of the facts. I did not find it effective to scour the web for blogs and gauge their levels of truthfulness.
Oddly enough, I could not find a book for the millions of programmers who know Java or a similar language and who want to learn JavaScript, as it exists today, without the historical baggage.
So I had to write it.
