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.
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.
Christian Heilmann lays out seven rules to better unobtrusive JavaScript, including not making assumptions about JavaScript, the browser and the document. Work with structured markup. If you are traversing a document, maybe there's a solution that can take advantage of CSS's selector mechanism instead. Work with browsers and users. Better understanding of events, and playing nice with namespace, scope, and patterns. And of course, think about the next developer, so keep the code maintainable.