My 5 Essential JavaScript Books (2020)
Whether you’re a rank beginner or seasoned veteran of JavaScript, it seems that one can never have enough books.
For those who prefer to have a physical book in their hands when learning something new, we decided to put together a list of our favorite five JavaScript books. While at first glance you might be a little concerned that some of these were printed a few years ago. However, so far the concepts that these books introduce still hold up for the most part today. An added bonus, is that because of their age, they should be perhaps less expensive. You might even be able to find them at your local library.
5. JavaScript and jQuery: Interactive Front-End Web Development
Written by John Duckett, this book is squarely aimed at an audience of people interested in learning how to write JavaScript, but don’t work in IT.
Like most of the books in this list, it goes through basic JavaScript concepts and sprinkles in some neat (and common) “how to” tasks such as image sliders for a web page.
4. Eloquent JavaScript
Marijn Haverbekedives goes through the process of teaching you how to write “beautiful”, code.
He starts with the basic structure of the JavaScript language as well as the control structures and functions. He then steps into the world of error handling and bug fixing (an important skillset), modularity and asynchronous programming.
3. A Smarter Way To Learn JavaScript
From Mark Mayers, this is a useful book to have nearby whether you’re just beginning your JavaScript journey, or if you’re further along. This book is quite easy to pickup and work through, with quite a bit of coding samples and illustrations.
2. Head First JavaScript Programming: A Brain Friendly Guide
I’ve always been a fan of the “Head First” series of books and Elizabeth Robinson definitely puts together another great entry to the series. As with the others in our list, this book goes through a lot of the fundamentals to JavaScript up to some pretty advanced topics. Elizabeth discusses data structures, objects, functions and the brower DOM (Document Object Model).
1. Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja
John Resig, Bear Bibeault and Josip Maras go through practical examples to educate each core concept and technique. It covers handy JavaScript concepts like objects, functions, closures and prototypes.
