View Me First: The Crockford Clips

Sure, “The JavaScript Programming Language” and “Advanced JavaScript” are dull titles, but the videos clips are anything but. Speaking with an insider’s perspective, Yahoo! JavaScript Architect Douglas Crockford first explains why “Javascript is the world’s most misunderstood language” and then steps quickly through the whys, wherefores, and howtos of the web’s best friend. Crockford invented the notion of using JSON as an Ajax payload, and the videos reflect his innovative and pragmatic view of JavaScript as a strange but powerful programming language.

If you are just learning JavaScript, view these clips first. If you think you know JavaScript, view these clips now, and find out what the language really can do.

The “Crockford Clips” are from three live teaching sessions covering JavaScript, the DOM, and Advanced JavaScript. Viewing all three sets (in that order) is well worth the time, if only for Crockford’s insider asides on the politics-err-process of language and browser development.

Some key takeaways from all three sessions:

• Learn to like loose typing
• Learn to love objects as containers
• Think prototypes, not classes
• There are six values; everything else is an object
• Be wary of uncommon arithmetic
• NaN is a perplexing value (and toxic!)

• Globals are evil

• Use a platform library

• Be correct, be common, be standard

• The wrong people are writing our standards

• Globals are still evil

• Prefer power constructors
• Work with the grain
• Native JavaScript patterns create elegant reuse
• Debuggers work, use one
• Local variables are cheap, use them.
• Minify and gzip, but do not obsuficate
• JSON rocks!
  Hint: Save yourself some pausing. Download the slides first, and click along on a second monitor or laptop. And before commenting on slide 63, read the other reviews :)