Ivo Wetzel covers some of the quirks of the JavaScript language. Some of these cause subtle bugs, some overturn conventional wisdom. It covers toString on numbers. Covers the advanced JavaScript features such as prototypal inheritance, this, closures, anonymous wrappers, type-casting, automatic semicolon insertion and hoisting of function and variable declarations.
Based on Simon Willison's original 2005 eTech talk, Simon expands this into a full article covering the expressive functionality of JavaScript. He covers the basics of JavaScript: literals, variables, functions, scope, control flow, objects, classes, inner functions and closures. Everything a developer needs to know before diving into more advanced JavaScript.
Ben Cherry, web developer at Twitter, takes us step by step through the Module Pattern. He introduces the standard features of Anonymous Closures and avoiding global scope, and covers advanced concepts such as augmentation, cloning, inheritance, private state and sub-modules.
A clever hands-on interactive mini-course by Nathan Whitehead that guides you through bite-sized chunks from variables, to functions, to return values, to functions as first-class objects and right into closures and finally continuations. The hands-on exercises are JS Linted and unit-tested which gives you ample space to try out your new-found knowledge.
Douglas Crockford explains the new strict mode introduced in the 5th edition of ECMAScript. It is an opt-in mode that repairs or removes some of the language's most problematic features such as: function scoping, implied global variables and global leakage, read-only variable failures, octal defaults and function arguments.
Angus Croll takes the reader step-by-step through some basic JavaScript code explaining what 'this' is in each step and why. He explains how 'this' depends on the execution context, and how it is manipulated by how JavaScript functions are called (or applied or bound with bind), and how Constructors create a new context.
Eric Miraglia explains Douglas Crockford's Module pattern, a way of creating encapsulated JavaScript functions that offer private and public methods and properties. It uses an anonymous function that returns an object containing our methods, and avoids the big issue of cluttering up the global namespace with global functions. Its based on the Singleton pattern.
As web pages become more and more like applications, code performance becomes more and more important. This article looks at a number of performance issues to avoid, in EcmaScript, DOM and AJAX requests. Covers eval, the with keyword, try/catch in performance-critical code, global variables, implicit object conversion, string concatenation, primitive operations over function calls, repainting and reflowing documents, modifying elements, using XPath.
Douglas Crockford's presentation on Advanced JavaScript. He covers topics such as inheritance, modules, debugging, efficiency and JSON.
Douglas Crockford explains why global variables in JavaScript are evil, causing unreliability and insecurity. JavaScript is a block of text that is eval'ed which leaves artifacts in the window's global object. He talks about why Yahoo! chose to use the global variable YAHOO all in uppercase.
First in a series of talks from Douglas Crockford about the JavaScript language. These talks cover the JavaScript language, from the history, the language, advanced features, platforms, standards and programming style. Talks about inheritance, using functions to build objects, closures, as well as the basic JavaScript syntax. Also covers code conventions. JavaScript is a language that requires discipline.
Matt Kruse's JavaScript Toolbox presents a number of excellent best practice ideas including: using var, feature detection, when to use square bracket notation, avoiding eval, referencing forms and form elements, avoiding the with keyword, using onclick instead of JavaScript pseudo-protocol, using unary + to type convert to numbers, avoiding document.all, not using HTML comments in script blocks, avoid cluttering the global namespace, avoiding prototype.js, avoiding synch Ajax calls, using JSON and the correct way to use script tags