Book Review: Pro JavaScript Design Patterns

There are a lot of good books out there, whether they’re novels, references, or they teach you a skill or craft. In the JavaScript world, the book selection can be somewhat limited because it was only until semi-recent years that it took hold as a real language with real applicability, so older books on the subject can be a bit out of the loop. One of the books that treats JavaScript like a real language is Pro JavaScript Design Patterns.

Background

Pro JavaScript Design Patterns was written by Dustin Diaz and Ross Harmes. It was published by Apress in 2007, about the time that JavaScript’s real value was beginning to show itself. Dustin Diaz has worked for Twitter, Google, and Yahoo, giving him some great experience and expertise.Ross Harmes has worked for Yahoo! Small Business and currently a front end engineer for Flickr, also making him someone worth listening to.

The Book

This book is for just about any JavaScript developer who wants to take their JavaScript programming to the next level. Design patterns are extremely useful in any language to help make code more modular, maintainable, and more easily extendable. This definitely still holds true for JavaScript. JavaScript’s design patterns are quite a bit different than the ones you see in other languages, though, because JavaScript itself is quite different from many other languages. This means that reading other books on design patterns generally won’t translate easily to JavaScript.

If you’ve been following this blog for a decent time, then you may have already read the posts about design patterns here. Pretty much all of those posts were based largely on the content from this book, so obviously I believe the information contained within it is valuable. But don’t think that just because you read my posts, that this book isn’t worth picking up. Typically I broke 15-20 page chapters down into about 1000 words, so there’s definitely a ton of information in that book that you’d be missing out on if you believed my posts were sufficient to become a JavaScript design patterns guru.

Conclusion

I’m not sure there’s much else to say here. This book will teach you many useful, advanced JavaScript techniques that can bring your web programming to a new, higher level than before. If you’re just starting to get the hang of JavaScript, though, I would recommend holding off on this one until you’re a bit more proficient. God bless and happy coding.