05.15.08
Need to learn JavaScript?
Here’s how: a series of video lectures together with notes. An example of the notes:
Points that caught my attention in JavaScript Video Lecture Part I
- (00:45) World’s most misunderstood programming language - has “Java” in its name and “Script”. It has nothing to do with Java programming language and it’s a real programming language not some tiny scripting language
- (02:3
There are generally no books available to learn JS from - all are bad and full of nasty examples
- (02:56) The only book recommended is JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, 5th Edition
by David Flanagan - the least bad book
- (03:37) JavaScript is a functional language
- (08:12) Microsoft reverse engineered original implementation of JavaScript and called it JScript to avoid trademark issues
- (09:49) During standardization, the original bugs were left as is without fixing to prevent already written programs from breaking (Douglas slips and says “Sun” but he actually means “Microsoft”)
- (12:16) One of the key ideas of the language is prototypal inheritance where objects inherit from objects and there are no classes
- (12:45) One other key idea is that functions are first-class objects
- (13:36) There are no integers in the language, everything is represented as 64-bit floating point numbers
- (14:30) NaN (Not a Number) is not equal to antyhing, including NaN. Which means NaN == NaN is false
- (15:22) Type of NaN is Number
And so on.
