

Eloquent Javascript - free Online Book with a console to try the language. - cfontes
http://eloquentjavascript.net/chapter1.html

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willyt
I just read the first couple of chapters and I find it a bit painful to be
honest. I am not a CS grad and I don't write software as my primary job though
I do write code to solve problems in my discipline. I have programmed C, Ruby
and Obj-C a bit over the years and I find the pace of this book too slow and
overly wordy. Yet, I think a beginner would find it quite hard going. Thinking
back to when I was first learning, the first exercise (2.1) has too many traps
to trip up an absolute beginner and you wouldn't write a true/false expression
like that in practice. So, I'm not sure who the target audience is for this
book. But, I'll have a read of it anyway because it's the nicest 'Learn
Javascript' web resource I've seen so far. Picaxe is still probably the best
introduction to a language I have read, gets right in there quickly with
minimum fuss.

~~~
grayrest
The first few chapters are very dry. When I recommend this to people I
normally tell them to skim the first chapters and skip forward if they're
getting bored. If you hold out to at least chapter 6, I'm sure you'll find
something worthwhile.

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bergie
The source for the book is on GitHub: <https://github.com/marijnh/Eloquent-
JavaScript>

There is also a CoffeeScript "port" of the book, since Eloquent JavaScript is
open content: <http://autotelicum.github.com/Smooth-CoffeeScript/>

~~~
cfontes
Thanks for the info, I found it really clever to have a working console really
nicely integrated within the HTML book text. I am a Java developer and scala
student myself but my mission to 2012 is to learn javascript and I am enjoying
this book very much.

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petercooper
If you prefer print, like me, No Starch Press published it earlier this year
too. Just checked on Amazon and even Brendan Eich gave it a review(!) :-) It's
probably the best overall introduction I've seen so far, although other books
do go further into the details, naturally.

~~~
hello_moto
I heard the print edition has less materials (having said that I haven't
actually checked line by line to confirm).

~~~
telemachos
The print edition doesn't include Chapter 7 ("Searching") from the web
edition. (There may be parts of the other chapters missing, but I'm not sure.)

That said, Chapter 7 of the web edition begins this way:

> This chapter does not introduce any new JavaScript-specific concepts.
> Instead, we will go through the solution to two problems, discussing some
> interesting algorithms and techniques along the way. If this does not sound
> interesting to you, it is safe to skip to the next chapter.

So maybe the author or the publisher (or both?) decided that chapter was a
distraction or somehow wrong for the printed version.

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cskau
I wonder if this was posted pointing to /chapter1.html just to circumvent the
limitation that you can't repost old posts.

This was previously posted 681 days ago:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1056132>

~~~
cfontes
No it was not, I simply didn't know nor tryed the principal page URL and
wanted to point directly to the page were the console was... If Y combinator
guys feels like, please remove the post and my points.

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mark_l_watson
I bought this as an e-book a while ago - I had never spent very much time
coding Javascript and I bought the book to brush up. Recommended. BTW, I spent
the weekend working on a Clojure + Javascript + Noir app for a customer and I
actually enjoyed the Javascript part :-)

~~~
ludwigvan
Have you considered using ClojureScript, instead? I wonder how mature it is at
the moment.

~~~
mark_l_watson
I have only played a bit with ClojureScript, not enough to have a real
opinion. I think I will wait a while until it is in an API stable state and
there are tools for auto building assets, etc.

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scarmig
A really great book.

And now you can Javascript in the browser itself!

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Cieplak
Very well done.

I read this book the week before I began a JavaScript class in college, and
the first hundred pages alone were enough to get me through the course.

~~~
darushimo
Great to hear. I'll be chipping away at this shortly. Thanks, Cieplak.

~~~
Cieplak
No, thank you for writing such a wonderful piece. I just glanced over the
first few chapters for the first time in over a year and was delighted. I
remember stepping through that bit of assembly in chapter one with a pen and
paper, then running the two js versions of the code in my browser. Some
commenters have criticized the prose of the book; for me this really helped
contextualize certain things that seasoned programmers take for granted. I
would argue that this is more approachable for a beginner than Ritchie &
Kernighan's book or SICP. But I suppose those aren't necessarily beginner
books. For some reason, I like your book quite a lot more than a few
introductory Python books I've read. Although Ruby is far more beautiful and
useful to me than JS these days, I think it is a very bad idea to force object
orientation onto beginners. It is better to let people ask for it when they
need it, than to force it onto beginners (I can't help but think of Yegge's
Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns). Accordingly, I think JS is a very suitable
learning language because it provides a taste of object-oriented and
functional programming, while maintaining a familiar C style syntax. Also,
it's very powerful for event oriented programming, as demonstrated by node.js.
I stopped programming in js because of frustration for lack of lisp-style
macros, but perhaps clojurescript can fix this.

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padenot
For people that prefer to read french instead of english, this book has
recently been translated over the course of a weekend by Mozilla volunteers
and Framalang people : <http://books.lifeleaks.com/eloquentjavascript/>,
<https://github.com/Pandark/Eloquent-Javascript-translation>

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hkarthik
Anyone know if this has been published as an epub? Thats my preferred way to
consume e-Books these days since I can share bookmarks between my iPhone and
iPad using iBooks.

~~~
skymt
No Starch Press sells a DRM-free ePub version for $24:
<http://nostarch.com/ejs>

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carlsednaoui
Looks really interesting, will start reading this tonight.

~~~
jenius
Carl! weird that I saw you here. awesome book though, it will certainly help

~~~
carlsednaoui
Haha, crazy coincidence!!

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hoytie
I feel like the repeated usage of "print()" in the beginning is more confusing
than helpful.

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bountie
is the JS console custom-build, or from a library used elsewhere?

