About this book

This book is certainly not a light introduction to JavaScript. That's not to say that this book is not for a novice JavaScript developer. It's going to be overwhelming, but hopefully well worth it. Here's why.

The aim of this book is to provide accumulated experience of a working JavaScript developer for each and every topic. The layers that build up as you progress as a developers are here condensed into a single compact treatment in each section. This book does not try to arrive at conclusions the same way you would if you were learning on your own, and in doing so, the hope is that some of the confusion and mystery around the concepts being discussed would be removed.

Assimilate JS is not meant to be read cover-to-cover. Topics are mostly self-contained, with references to other topics only as needed to understand the current one. It is also not meant to be memorized, but read and re-read as you run into problems that are covered herein. Even if you feel that the material is overwhelming, I suggest you mentally bookmark the sections so you can get back to them at some later time, when you discover that what you are doing has some semblance to what you saw in this book.

Individual sections of this book are written as literate ECMAScript 6 modules. This means that the code snippets embedded in the markdown comprise a complete working program that can be executed using NodeJS. Instructions on how to get and run the code is outlined further below.

This book is also a work in progress. New chapters are added (almost) every week, as my time permits, or as I run into new and interesting topics I wish to explore.

Finally, it is my hope that this book is going to end up being a collaborative effort between you, my readers, and me. I encourage you to send me feedback by filing an issue on GitHub or commenting directly on the online version of the book.

Getting the sources

To obtain the sources, simply clone the repository using git, or download it.

To clone the repository run:

git clone https://github.com/foxbunny/javascript-by-example.git
cd javascript-by-example

Then run this command in the source directory:

npm install

This will install Babel and a few more related packages, which enables you to run the examples.

Running the examples

To run the examples, use npm start [example module] command, where [example module] is the module's file name with or without the .js extension. For example, if you wish to run proto.js, you would run this command:

npm start proto

Literate modules

The markdown modules are literate JavaScript modules. They are made executable using the literatejs program. There is some boilerplate code in the run.js script if you are curious.

License

This code in this repository is licensed under the MIT license. See the license file for more information.

Reporting issues

Please use the issue tracker to report issues with the examples or documentation. You are also welcome to submit pull requests with fixes or even completely new modules.

Ideas for new topics to cover is also very welcome!

About the author

I am a long-time web developer with over 8 years of experience programming in JavaScript. My relationship with JavaScript has started even before frontend engineering was the thing, scripting Adobe software using the JavaScript scripting API. Although I have also done NodeJS development, my main focus nowadays is on frontend engineering. I love JavaScript, and lately also writing about it.

You can tweet to me, @foxbunny, on Twitter, and read more of the musings, that didn't quite fit this book, on Medium.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all my friends that gave me encouragement and feedback. In particular, I would like to mention:

• Andrean
• Manish
• Ben
• Abhishek
• Vitomir

I keep writing this book thanks to these great buddies!