You Don't Know JS: Up & Going

Chapter 3. Into YDKJS

What is this series all about? Put simply, it’s about taking seriously the task of learning all parts of JavaScript, not just some subset of the language that someone called “the good parts,” and not just whatever minimal amount you need to get your job done at work.

Serious developers in other languages expect to put in the effort to learn most or all of the language(s) they primarily write in, but JS developers seem to stand out from the crowd in the sense of typically not learning very much of the language. This is not a good thing, and it’s not something we should continue to allow to be the norm.

The You Don’t Know JS (YDKJS) series stands in stark contrast to the typical approaches to learning JS, and is unlike almost any other JS books you will read. It challenges you to go beyond your comfort zone and to ask the deeper “why” questions for every single behavior you encounter. Are you up for that challenge?

I’m going to use this final chapter to briefly summarize what to expect from the rest of the books in the series, and how to most effectively go about building a foundation of JS learning on top of YDKJS.

Scope & Closures

Perhaps one of the most fundamental things you’ll need to quickly come to terms with is how scoping of variables really works in JavaScript. It’s not enough to have anecdotal fuzzy beliefs about scope.

The Scope & Closures title starts by debunking the common misconception that JS is an “interpreted language” ...