I personally never really liked that book even when it was new. It's good if you wanna get up and running with JS fast while coming from another language, and are forced to use JS in places but it's not the main language of your project.

But it doesn't really give a strong foundation on understanding the language. It's more like "I know mainstream C-inspired languages, and JS often burns me with its weird quirks like how the this keyword works, I just want to avoid getting burned". But it doesn't really embrace JS itself, just sort of acknowledges that you will be forced to use it in the web so you may as well at least learn the "good" parts.

It's still decent at that purpose, but for really strong competency in JS I can also vouch for the Eloquent JS book and the You Don't Know JS series (I've only read the first edition, a new edition is partially complete and available online).

> it doesn't really embrace JS itself, just sort of acknowledges that you will be forced to use it in the web so you may as well at least learn the "good" parts.

I'm sure you know this, so I'm just pointing it out for completeness sake: that was indeed the only sensible approach to JavaScript back when that book was written.

The code in it will still run and work but there are much better patterns and features now that help you write more succinct and less error-prone code.

ES6 and ES7 are widely supported now and are much better languages IMO.

Thanks, that's kind of what I thought. I recently, finally, took it off of my book shelf and stuffed it into a box in the garage, but it's been in the back of my mind a few times as I've been going through other resources. It's good for the historical understanding but I couldn't see it being terribly relevant today.

As a noobie, Eloquent Javascript was much better for me than The Good Parts. The Good Parts was a book of how not to program, followed by the right way of doing it. Eloquent was a guided path to understanding the language without being shown all the dead ends.

Knowing the dead ends and the history behind them is nice, but I spent a lot of brain power on the dead ends that Eloquent put towards better use.

We're also talking a small book vs a tome of knowledge, but the philosophy is different regardless of size.

Unless the book has had an updated edition it's missing all the ES6 good stuff. It was good to avoid the pitfalls of JavaScript in the past, but nowadays you should be using ES6, strict mode and, if that strikes your fancy, TypeScript.