Hello Folks!!! Hope you are doing well. This Article is the first in my Eloquent Javascript Summary Series. Hope that you like it, and make sure you subscribe to my newsletter to be notified about the upcoming articles :)
What is Eloquent Javascript?
Eloquent JS is one of the most celebrated books when it comes to diving deep into Javascript that too from its beginning.
It spans across Javascript and flows with general programming concepts in mind. The author of this book is Marijn Haverbeke.
It looks perfect for people who've had "some" prior experience in programming in general.
I want to, but can't speak surely about whether a beginner would be able to digest it easily but as always let me know in the comments if it would fit for beginners :)
Anyways, the book is full of motivation, guidance and real life puzzles that account to an interesting read for beginners too.
Chapter I: Introduction.
- Computers are dumb and over-precise and for that matter programming is fundamentally tedious and frustrating. But once we get over this fact and enjoy the hard work that goes into thinking what these dump machines can possibly deal with, it becomes rewarding.
- A Programming language is an artificially constructed language used to instruct computers, and it's easy to create one, but difficult to manage.
- The fundamentals(Semantics, etc.) are simple and sound clear most of the time, but programs built on top of these rules introduce their own rules and complexities.
- If you struggle to follow up programming it's best to take a break, reread the material instead of jumping to conclusions about our own capabilities.
- Learning anything at all is Hard Work, but everything we learn is ours and will make subsequent learning easier.
- A
programcan be many things, it directs the computer, it is data in the computer's memory, yet it controls the actions performed on the same memory. - The art of programming is the skill of controlling complexity. A great program is simple in its own complexity.
- A sense of what a good program looks like is developed in practice, and not learned from a list of rules.
- Javascript has nothing to do with programming language named Java. The similarity in name comes from marketing considerations rather than good judgement.
- ECMAScript and JavaScript are two names for the same language.
- Code is the text that makes up programs.
- While learning JS from the book don't assume that you understand the exercise questions unless you've written a working solution.
- JavaScript is extremely liberal in what it allows(coercion,etc), which makes it easier for beginners to start with it, but makes debugging a program harder.
Note:
The Book Is Freely available except for the hard copy, and can be accessed from here.
The Sandbox allows you to solve the Exercise questions or play with JS on the browser, so that you spend less time setting this up locally :)
Other articles I'll recommend you to read:
Make sure to share this if you found it helpful, and keep learning, you're a genius.