Although, JavaScript: The Good Parts is nearly ten years old I would argue it’s still a pretty good book to read. Literally, as the title implies the book calls out the best parts of the javascript language and tells what parts of the language to avoid.

I think it’s intended for novice/intermediate level developers that are ready to really master the core of the language. I’ve had to read the book a few times to really understand some of what Douglas wrote about because it’s so dense.

It’s clear and concise, and there’s a lot of explanations about why this code is better than that code. Douglas has some really fantastic diagrams in the book about how things work.

Douglas Crockford wisely identified a lot of the good ideas and the things to hide away from in JavaScript.  He looks deeply into a lot of what made JavaScript beautiful like Syntax, Objects, Functions, Inheritance, Arrays, Regular Expressions, and Methods.

The language used in the book is really outdated as it uses ECMAScript 3 which was released in 1999. JavaScript has changed quite a bit over the years, but the fundamentals are still mostly the same because a lot of the language didn’t really change until ECMAScript 2015.

I recently found these incredible notes about the book and feel like they make a really good companion. Notes On the Seminal JavaScript the Good Parts.

I would probably buy the book again as it was incredibly invaluable at providing some really good context into why JavaScript, why it’s so strange at times and why JSON is an amazing standard for data transmission. I do think there are now better resources available though. Kyle Simpson’s You Don’t Know JS books are much easier reading and a little bit more relevant.

And finally, there are some pages of the book that are definitely not relevant any longer which I would expect for a book of this age.