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?
I work with an awesome cast of developers at Mozilla, and one of them in Daniel Buchner. Daniel's shared with me an awesome strategy for detecting when nodes have been injected into a parent node without using the deprecated DOM Events API.
Your early CSS books were instrumental in pushing my love for front end technologies. What was it about CSS that you fell in love with and drove you to write about it?
At first blush, it was the simplicity of it as compared to the table-and-spacer...
It's best practice to provide an indicator of some sort when performing an AJAX request or processing that takes place in the background. Since the dawn of AJAX, we've been using colorful spinners and imagery as indicators. While I enjoy those images, I am...
If I can avoid using JavaScript for element animations, I'm incredibly happy and driven to do so. They're more efficient, don't require a JavaScript framework to manage steps, and they're more elegant. One effect that is difficult to nail down with pure CSS is sliding up...
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.
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.
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.
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.
errr…. I don’t see any link to the video, am I missing something?
my bad, video did not show up the first time
Really nice… I learn a lot of things… mostly in the Object part, I was missing over there… Thanks for post it!
Cheers.
No one laughs at Steve, and everyone chuckles with Doug. (No real value, I know, but JavaScript developers should watch this).