Jan 28

Reading for the modern web

A coworker recently asked for some JavaScript pointers and I figured I'd pass them along to everyone else

JavaScript the Good Parts is a classic book, if you're into dead trees and want to learn why some people love JavaScript. You can get a lot of the philosophy of modern JavaScript wizardry for free from Douglas Crockford (YUI) and John Resig (jQuery) and there's a ton of good stuff covering everything from philosophy to in-the-trenches coding available from YUI Theater.

DailyJS.com is a good resource for staying abrest of what's going on (not a huge fan of ajaxian.com's style); the 24ways.org web advent calendar was a good survey of where modern web development's going.

Finally, Google's closure library has some interesting tools (Closure Compiler is great) and the articles explaining their philosophy have a lot to learn from even if you don't use the Closure library; there's also a lot of modern performance wisdom summarized in Let's make the web faster, some directly JavaScript related and most of the rest of interest to any front-end developer.

Tags: