What are the best and most up to date books on JS (for beginners)? I usually learn by doing but maybe reading a book is a good starting point.
This is going to sound stupid but… how do you learn by reading? Do you just read the book from cover to cover, and then you get “aha yeah i remember reading about this in that book…”-moments when faced with IRL JS-stuff, or do you read it slowly, making sure you get everything in your head before going to the next chapter?
Aha! That’s where doing useful things as a part of learning becomes handy, such as with Head First JavaScript. It provides several different ways to take the information in in enjoyable ways.
I’m sure that others around here too will recommend others such as Eloquent JavaScript or The Good Parts, but if you want to learn while doing in an effective manner, it’s hard to find others that do it as well as Head First.
Cool, sounds like a book for me. Ordered=)
I am a huge fan of the O’Reilly books… on anything… JavaScript, Regular Expressions, PHP, you name it… they’ve probably got a very good book on it. (Nothing against SP books… I’ve got one on JavaScript that, although it’s outdated now, is excellent reading.)
But most of the learning I do is from online sources. Forums (like this one), tutorials, code bins, etc. Just looking at some code that someone else wrote and deciphering it into understandable packets, easily digestable.
HTH,
I don’t know how good they are for beginners, or where you’re beginning from… but these are great and free online directly from the authors:
http://eloquentjavascript.net/
http://addyosmani.com/resources/essentialjsdesignpatterns/book/ (my favorite reference on patterns)
So got my “head first javascript” today… time to really start learning this stuff.
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