JavaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford

By  on  

Rarely do I ever command you to do something but I've watched this video three times now and I'm completely mesmerized by Douglas Crockford's tech talk, JavaScript: The Good Parts.  During this hour long talk, Douglas Crockford shares his insight about both the good and bad parts of the JavaScript language.  He covers the language's embarrassing misteps, its valuable hacks, and its powerful features.

I can't recommend this video enough.  It's funny, educational, and enlightening.  Even if you can only leave the audio on in the background, you must give this video a listen.  Crockford wrote a JavaScript book with the same title which I cannot speak for.

Once you've had a chance to listen, share your thoughts -- what are you favorite "good parts" of JavaScript? What really burns you about the language?

Recent Features

  • By
    CSS Gradients

    With CSS border-radius, I showed you how CSS can bridge the gap between design and development by adding rounded corners to elements.  CSS gradients are another step in that direction.  Now that CSS gradients are supported in Internet Explorer 8+, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome...

  • By
    Animated 3D Flipping Menu with CSS

    CSS animations aren't just for basic fades or sliding elements anymore -- CSS animations are capable of much more.  I've showed you how you can create an exploding logo (applied with JavaScript, but all animation is CSS), an animated Photo Stack, a sweet...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    CSS @supports

    Feature detection via JavaScript is a client side best practice and for all the right reasons, but unfortunately that same functionality hasn't been available within CSS.  What we end up doing is repeating the same properties multiple times with each browser prefix.  Yuck.  Another thing we...

  • By
    MooTools Typewriter Effect Plugin Upgrade

    Last week I shared my MooTools Typewriter Class with you. It was pretty well received and I got a few feature requests that I've implemented including "backspacing" and character variance delays. I'm not going to explain the old code, so click here...

Discussion

  1. Absolutely second this post – awesome tips and principles for balancing idealism and pragmatism in a language where both can leave you high and dry, scratching your head wondering what went wrong…

    You can’t possibly listen to Crockford and not learn something new. Don’t even try.

  2. Wow. I figured he would be telling me stuff that I already knew, but he keeps on revealing amazing amounts of information that will improve my code significantly.

    Just blew me away.

  3. errr…. I don’t see any link to the video, am I missing something?

  4. my bad, video did not show up the first time

  5. Really nice… I learn a lot of things… mostly in the Object part, I was missing over there… Thanks for post it!
    Cheers.

  6. No one laughs at Steve, and everyone chuckles with Doug. (No real value, I know, but JavaScript developers should watch this).

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!