Modern JavaScript Deep Dive

Development is a curious thing. No matter the language or framework, it feels impossibly hard when you first learn it, then becomes easy and fun once it starts to feel familiar, and once you get comfortable, you feel like you’ve become a master of development. And then, after even more time has passed, at some point a thought suddenly strikes you. I think I know it, but do I really know it properly? Have my knowledge and skills reached a sharp, honed level?

It’s been about nine years since I started making money with JavaScript. That’s a long time if you call it long, and a short time if you call it short. In any case, looking at the language itself, the past nine years have been turbulent years. The language, the development culture, and its applications have all seen tremendous progress. To someone just starting out in JavaScript development, I might look like a fairly battle-hardened (?) old (?) JavaScript developer. But at some point I began to have repeated doubts about my own skills. Am I really using JavaScript with a solid understanding of it?

Then, just as I started reading this book, my mind grew dizzy. I knew JavaScript, but I did not know it precisely. Reading this book made it clear that until now I had only used JavaScript based on vague experience, lacking a precise understanding of how it actually works. My concerns turned out to be true…

That’s how thoroughly this book explains the way JavaScript works. Everyone knows these things are important, and we use them in development every single day, yet the book meticulously points out the very concepts I had never understood precisely. In effect, you could call it a kind of mental physical therapy for lazy developers like me. If you’re a JavaScript developer, I recommend giving it a read regardless of your years of experience. Even if it’s all content you already know, if you can reaffirm a well-organized understanding of it once more, I think there’s still something to be gained from that.

Of course, this book isn’t the one perfect book for JavaScript development. Most of the book leans heavily toward syntactic explanations and how things work, and its coverage of other areas isn’t all that detailed. And the book is very thick (over 900 pages). Still, it’s thinner than the dragon book… and above all, it reads quickly relative to its length. Nor, for that matter, does it address the question, “So how should one actually go about JavaScript development?” Then again, that’s not the subject this book deals with.

I recommend this book to developers who feel like they both know and don’t know JavaScript.

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