JavaScript: The Good Parts

A few weeks ago, Shea Frederick asked me if I could put together a presentation for the July meeting of the Baltimore/DC JavaScript Users Group. We talked about some of the things we’ve been working on, and I mentioned that I’d been reading JavaScript: The Good Parts, an amazing book by Douglas Crockford. And a “book review” style presentation was born.

I decided that since the book is so dense with js knowledge, I’d just pull out my favorite takeaways and put the into a 30 minute presentation.

I didn’t spend too much time polishing the slides (or my delivery), so it came off more as a discussion than a “presentation”. It was fun. The 10 or so folks in the room chatted about the virtues of a loosely-typed language, debated about whether == is truly evil, and were truly grossed out by one of the images in the deck.

"JavaScript: The Good Parts" Summary from Jonathan Julian

It was fun. I think next time, I’ll spend more time in spidermonkey doing some live coding, as well as showing off JSLint running on the cmd-line. And brush up on some language details - Jay Garcia schooled me on why the === works (it internally compares types before comparing values). My only regret is that I missed the jalapeno & pineapple pizza.