5 Best JavaScript Books and Why

Introduction

There are a lot of great books out there to help you learn JavaScript. Here are 5 of the best:

JavaScript: The Good Parts

The book covers all parts of the language, but focuses on those features that make JavaScript powerful and easy to read.

It’s written by Douglas Crockford, who is both a JavaScript expert and a great writer—so you know if you’re ever looking for some quick code snippets or simply need a good introduction to the language, you can always go back to this book.

You Don’t Know JS (Series)

• What this book is: You Don’t Know JS is a series of books that cover the JavaScript language. The author, Kyle Simpson, has also written other books on other programming languages, and he’s well-known in the community as a developer advocate who specializes in JavaScript.
• Why you should read it: This book will help you get better at using JavaScript if you are an absolute beginner or intermediate user. It goes into great detail about all kinds of topics, including the basics (variables and functions) to more advanced topics like closures and prototypal inheritance. If you want a comprehensive overview of how JavaScript works under the hood and how it can be used effectively, this series is for you!

JavaScript Allongé

• JavaScript Allongé, by Reginald Braithwaite

It’s hard to believe that this book is only a couple years old and yet it feels like it was written in the Stone Age. It’s about functional programming in JavaScript, which is a topic that has been getting more and more attention lately. The author does an outstanding job explaining how FP works and how you can use it to make your code easier to read and maintain. The book is packed with examples that should help you get started on your own projects.

Eloquent JavaScript

Eloquent JavaScript is a great introduction to JavaScript for beginners and advanced developers alike. The book covers the basics of programming in JavaScript, but it doesn’t stop there. This book will also teach you about object-oriented programming, creating a full-stack application using Node and Express, working with asynchronous code and much more.

Eloquent JavaScript is one of the most popular books on this list because it’s easy to understand—even if this is your first time learning programming! It’s perfect for those who want an introduction into basic concepts in web development with JavaScript as their primary language (or any other language).

Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja

Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja is a free online book that covers all the latest JavaScript features, including ES6, Promises and Generators. It also goes into depth about how to use JavaScript in Node.js and at the command line.

These are the five best books to learn JavaScript.

JavaScript: The Good Parts, by Douglas Crockford

This is a book that any beginner developer has to read. It’s not an introduction, but it will be helpful for anyone who wants to get a grasp on the basics of JavaScript. This book breaks down the language into its core concepts and explains how they work by going through them one at a time. It also explores topics that are commonly misunderstood about JavaScript such as closures and prototypical inheritance.

You Don’t Know JS (Series), by Kyle Simpson

There are three books in this series so far—the first two covering ES5 and ES6 respectively, with one more coming out soon covering ES7+. These books dive deep into all aspects of JavaScript including how it works under the hood; event looping; scope chains; prototypes; classes vs objects vs closures etc…

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed this list of the best JavaScript books. I know it can be challenging to learn a new programming language, but with these resources, I think anyone can become an expert in JavaScript.