The programmer is better off by leveraging on the good parts and avoiding features that are more trouble than they are worth. Imperfections are difficult to remove from a language, so they are destined to stay in the language. JavaScript: The Good Parts presents that most programming languages contain good parts and bad parts. If the reader doesn't mind the chapter on inheritance being a little hard to read, and take the railroad diagrams and modifying built-in objects with a grain of salt, the book is easy to digest. It suits well to plowing trough in a few days while trying to grasp the basics of JavaScript.

JavaScript: The Good Parts is easy to read and covers a subset of the language in 100 pages. Douglas Crockford: JavaScript: The Good Parts. While being a little outdated and covering only the ES3 JavaScript specification, the book is valuable today and holds its key takeaways.

Douglas Crockford, the author, is a familiar name in the JavaScript community and also serves on the ECMAScript committee. The prototype property is available if people want to inherit.JavaScript: The Good Parts is a classic title from 2008 that many refer to as the go-to introduction to the language. When they want one, they call Xyz.create(), and get back a new, initialized object of my type. the create() function is for users of my type. I return an object with a create() function, and a prototype property. This means I have a private space to work without making a mess in the global namespace. You can find his object creation function here: if (typeof Object.create != 'function') )(). However, JS is as it is so go and use 'new'. He (IMHO rightly) says that the way it turned out JS is conflicted, prototype based but with this one thing from 'classical class' inheritance languages. I understand this particular statement to be more on an 'academic' level, what SHOULD have been HAD the language been designed 'right' and not with some leftovers of the class-based inheritance stuff. However, the YUI(3) team itself uses 'new', and they DO follow his recommendations (since he's the Yahoo chief JS architect (UPDATE: he moved on, but the statement was true when this response was originally written). Crockford gives an example for an object creation function as should have been provided by JS itself in one of his Javascript talks available on

Crockford javascript the good parts