JavaScript For Web Designers

Published: December 22, 2021

I’ve been resting and recuperating the past couple of days due to a minor injury and as a result have gone a little stir–crazy. What better thing to do than visit A Book Apart and see what new (to me) titles they have available? Much to my delight, I find Mat Marquis’ new book, JavaScript For Web Designers. Having just closed the back cover I thought I’d jot down a few takeaways from the book, which is excellent.

JavaScript For Web Designers is perfect for anyone that needs a primer in JavaScript. The reader is left with a thorough grasp of concepts prerequisite to working with JavaScript such as case-sensitivity, camel-casing, semicolons, whitespace, the value of commenting our code, numbers, strings, undefined, null, Booleans, variables (including arrays) and objects. A basic knowledge of HTML and CSS is helpful as the author uses JavaScript to modify both the DOM (<p> and <a> tags specifically) and styling later on in the book.

The book is also perfect for anyone that needs a fundamental foundation in JavaScript. The reader gets a healthy and comprehensive dose of the basics of functions, conditional statements, loops (including the infinite variety) and last but not least DOM scripting. The book finishes with a few words on progressive enhancement and an impactful example of it’s benefits.

Having developed on the Web for quite some time, I have a certain level of comfort and confidence when it comes to authoring JavaScript. That said, reading this book deepened my understanding of several things. The stand-out concept for me was the author’s notion that everything in JavaScript is an object — sorta. I had never thought in those terms previously, but it resonates.

I also really like the fact that the author is opinionated, however with justification. For example, he has opinions about how we should declare our variables and why we should do it that way, same for semicolons vs. whitespace as another example. In addition to sharing his opinions, the author is downright funny! Lots of little chuckles are sprinkled throughout the book.

I have no reservations about wholeheartedly recommending this excellent title. Enjoy!

Filed in — Recommended Reads, Web Development