Why I’m not scared of JavaScript any more

My recent programming experience has been in C# and .NET, mainly on windows apps to support my business. However I needed to move to a web-based application, especially for our work in Africa.

The problem was the only bits of JavaScript I had seen up to this point was a few lines to say handle a button click. It looked very unstructured and, for a person used to OOP and C#,  rather nasty. So, what do I do in these cases… I bought a book, or in this case I bought two books. The effect was magic.

Book 1: Learning JavaScript Design Patterns

The first book I read was Learning JavaScript Design Patterns by Addy Osmani. I bought this because a) it was on design patterns and b) it was very recent. The last is important because JavaScript is developing at such a fast pace.

This book was just what I needed. I opened my eyes to how to Construct JavaScript cleanly and provide good structure to my programming. It made me much more confident of how to write well structured JavaScript.

I really recommend this book to anyone who is a programmer but doesn’t really know about the new ways of  building JavaScript programs.

Book2: Effective JavaScript

However I knew that a book on design patterns wouldn’t tell me the nitty gritty of the language. I already had the book JavaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford, but that hadn’t helped me to get inside the thinking of JavaScript.

I found a recent book called Effective JavaScript by David Herman. I have two Effective C# books and they really get into the depths of C#, so I got the JavaScript version. I was not disappointed.

Where the Design Pattern book gave me the overview the Effective JavaScript book took me deep into the inner workings of JavaScript. Also, from skim reading it to get a good idea of what to do and, more importantly, what NOT to do. This is now my bible of good coding standards in JavaScript.

Did the books help?

So, did reading these books make me a great JavaScript programmer? Of course not. But I was confident enough to design a fairly complex geospatial data visualisation system in JavaScript to work with OpenLayers.

I then when on to write the first basic module and some constructors to do the initial display of data on a map. They have a nice separation of concerns and when I wanted to refactor something it was nice and easy. It also came together quite easily with few bugs, although I really miss not having Unit Tests (that is another blog post to come!) Its likely I will get a JavaScript Guru to build the proper system, but at least I feel confident that I know what is going on now.

Maybe in a future post I will write why I actually LIKE JavaScript now because there are some bits that are really nice. But more importantly JavaScript is now the primary (only?) way ahead for responsive web design.