Review: The Principles of Object-Oriented JavaScript - Nicholas C. Zakas

I generally compare all technical publications against Clean Code by Robert Martin and JavaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford. Both books are easy to read and provide good working examples.  If a book is the size of Code Complete, I probably won't read it. 

The Principals of Object-Oriented JavaScript is definitely concise and I recommend it to anyone learning JavaScript or working in a shop where the fundamentals of the language need to be taught.  This book promises to help those who come from a strongly-typed background and it delivers by providing specific examples on the commonalities and differences between languages like Java/C# and JavaScript.  I also enjoyed learning some new details concerning ECMAScript 5 - albeit several years late.

Music to my eyes

Make no mistake: A lot of the concepts you may have learned in more traditional object-oriented programming languages don't necessarily apply to JavaScript. 

Knowing the function's arity is important in JavaScript because functions won't throw an error if you pass in too many or too few parameters. 

JavaScript functions don't actually have signatures. A lack of function signatures also means a lack of function overloading.

ECMAScript 5 Learning

1. Object.seal()
2. Object.freeze()

Although I learned this from ng-conf 2014, Zakas adds this fantastic feature of JS that I didn't know - what an idiot I've been

• get/set, really useful for coming up with your own $dirty checks, validation, etc.

THANK YOU FOR CONFIRMING THIS PATTERN!!!

• Scope-Safe Constructors

Wished you would have covered more of this: Hoisting

Although Zakas covers hoisting as it pertains to functions, I really wished he would have covered this topic for variable declarations.  I especially HATE seeing documentation/standards within companies covering the declaration of variables within block scopes and JavaScript.  You can always tell those standards were written by Java/C# folks not understanding the JavaScript language.  Even Crockford doesn't go into too much detail about hoisting and it's frustrating just telling folks: declare at the top - trust me.

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It's safe to say I'll be recommending this book to my shop in the hopes it not only will improve our understanding of JavaScript but that it might lead to more folks becoming passionate about the language that I love.