Klaus Komenda takes us through the history of development patterns of JavaScript demonstrating the pros and cons. Taking a typical JavaScript feature he starts with the old-school global functions method and iterates through a Singleton, Module Pattern, Revealing Module Pattern, Custom Objects and Lazy Function Definitions bringing the same feature up-to-date.
Michael Mahemoff runs into a problem with Protypes $$ function when looking for class names. Its taking over 90 seconds when more than 100 matches are returned. The advice is: Avoid $$(".classname") on large DOMs.
Douglas Crockford discusses his method of exposing the powerful prototypal inheritance from JavaScript, using his object function which untangles JavaScript's classical-adopted constructor pattern.
An explanation of scope in terms of an execution context and scope chain. Also describes how we can alter the this reference using apply and call.
An overview of object literals and object oriented programming, referencing attributes and functions, prototype objects, creating singletons.
Ryan Campbell volume tests Prototype's each() Enumeration function and finds that although the code is more elegant than the for loops, the overhead is quite heavy, and the performance impact too high. The summary: If basic JavaScript will do the task, then use basic JavaScript
Dustin Diaz names his top ten list, which includes Scott Andrew's addEvent(), Dean Edwards' cssQuery(). The cookie manipulation functions take the first three places, and the Prototype $() gets an honourable mention. Dustin also includes a JavaScript file containing all 10 favourite methods.