Author:	Douglas Crockford
Published:	May 2008
Publisher:	O'Reilly Publishing
Reviewer's Rating:	4/5

JavaScript: The Good Parts, is a concise, well written JavaScript guide intended for JavaScript developers with some degree of experience, and familiarity with the language. It does an excellent job of demonstrating to the developer how to get away from the object oriented class model that most popular languages of today utilize, and use the class free prototypal inheritance model which JavaScript was designed for.

In addition to looking at broad design of JavaScript programming, Crockford points out common mistakes and problems that plague even experienced web developers. This ranges from more complex problems like JavaScript's lack of tail recursion optimization, to the preferred ways of declaring simple arrays and objects. Things any developer can benifit from.

 Perhaps the most beneficial aspect of this book are the fully coded functions used to demonstrate shortfalls of JavaScript. These functions, such as is_array(), isNumber(), and trim(), not only provide the reader with an excellent solution, but gives a solid understanding of why the problem exists, and more importantly, why is must be corrected. Like all books, JavaScript: The Good Parts isn't without problems. While it provides an ample number of examples, some of the examples are overly condensed, and others seem incomplete.

Overall JavaScript: The Good Parts is a valuable book which I would recommend to anybody who wishes to get a deeper understanding of JavaScript, or simply just wants to write more efficient and more soundly structured code.

View more information about JavaScript: The Good Parts at the publisher's site