Walk This (JavaScript) Way

So I’ve decided to go ahead and write a book about JavaScript. It’s called The JavaScript Way and is available through Leanpub and GitHub (more on that later).

But… Why?

It’s true there are tons of learning resources about JS. However, many are outdated and teach obsolete practices. Many others cover advanced topics like design patterns, language internals, or frameworks that are of little interest to newcomers.

I’m starting this project because I think there is room for a beginner-centric book teaching modern JavaScript. I hope to make it a useful companion for anyone wishing to (re)discover the many facets of JS.

Design and content

The book is targeted towards JavaScript newcomers: complete beginners with no programming experience whatsoever or “switchers” coming from another language background. It won’t be a in-depth study of JavaScript (which is already existing, by the way). I’ll try to keep it as beginner-friendly as possible while covering some advanced concepts and good practices.

It was pretty obvious from the start that the book would be written entirely using the more future-proof and often easier to explain ES6/ES2015 standard. As I want to keep things simple, many tricky and primarily ES5-related topics like hoisting or this behavior won’t be covered.

As a teacher myself, I know that real learning comes from practicing. Each book chapter will be accompanied by a series of exercises to put the newly acquired skills into practice.

I also know that students don’t like to lose hours configuring their environment before getting their feet wet. So there won’t be any complex setup: throughout the book, all you’ll need is a JavaScript playground (CodePen and Gomix are the recommended ones) for coding along.

Publication

After much afterthought, I’ve decided to self-publish my book through Leanpub and to make its source code available on GitHub.

I’d like to reach as many people as possible, regardless of wealth. I also hope to leverage the open source collaborative model to improve and validate the content.

The chosen license, Creative Commons BY-NC-SA, lets anyone share or build upon this work for non-commercial purposes, as long as it is properly attributed and using the same license.

Let’s roll!

Publishing a book is a lot of work, but also a pretty exciting journey. Thanks for reading this, and I hope you’ll soon join me on the JavaScript Way.