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 Animations Between Media Queries

    CSS animations are right up there with sliced bread. CSS animations are efficient because they can be hardware accelerated, they require no JavaScript overhead, and they are composed of very little CSS code. Quite often we add CSS transforms to elements via CSS during...

  • By
    Introducing MooTools Templated

    One major problem with creating UI components with the MooTools JavaScript framework is that there isn't a great way of allowing customization of template and ease of node creation. As of today, there are two ways of creating: new Element Madness The first way to create UI-driven...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    MooTools Clipboard Plugin

    The ability to place content into a user's clipboard can be extremely convenient for the user. Instead of clicking and dragging down what could be a lengthy document, the user can copy the contents of a specific area by a single click of a mouse.

  • By
    Redacted Font

    Back when I created client websites, one of the many things that frustrated me was the initial design handoff.  It would always go like this: Work hard to incorporate client's ideas, dream up awesome design. Create said design, using Lorem Ipsum text Send initial design concept to the client...

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!