The Joy of JavaScript

2 Inheritance-based object modeling

This chapter covers

• Prototypal inheritance, constructor functions, and classes
• JavaScript’s property resolution mechanism
• The “prototypal inheritance” oxymoron
• Advantages and drawbacks of classes in JavaScript

Merely adding “prototypal” in front to distinguish the actually nearly opposite behavior in JavaScript has left in its wake nearly two decades of miry confusion.

—Kyle Simpson

Aside from a few primitives, everything in JavaScript is an object. Yet for something that we deal with routinely, objects continue to be the most intimidating, hard-to-get-right parts of the language. The most common question that I hear is “How should I write the prototype chain to relate X, Y, and Z?” Every article or book ...