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
    Serving Fonts from CDN

    For maximum performance, we all know we must put our assets on CDN (another domain).  Along with those assets are custom web fonts.  Unfortunately custom web fonts via CDN (or any cross-domain font request) don't work in Firefox or Internet Explorer (correctly so, by spec) though...

  • By
    5 Awesome New Mozilla Technologies You’ve Never Heard Of

    My trip to Mozilla Summit 2013 was incredible.  I've spent so much time focusing on my project that I had lost sight of all of the great work Mozillians were putting out.  MozSummit provided the perfect reminder of how brilliant my colleagues are and how much...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    PHP IMDB Scraper

    It's been quite a while since I've written a PHP grabber and the itch finally got to me. This time the victim is the International Movie Database, otherwise known as IMDB. IMDB has info on every movie ever made (or so it seems). Their...

  • By
    Cross Browser CSS Box Shadows

    Box shadows have been used on the web for quite a while, but they weren't created with CSS -- we needed to utilize some Photoshop game to create them.  For someone with no design talent, a.k.a me, the need to use Photoshop sucked.  Just because we...

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!