Why I'm starting to read books
Don't get me wrong, it is not like I never read, but in programming I never find them to appeal to me, but recently I've been trying to learn the more in-depth things of programming as in architecture, cleaner code and things like that, and generally finding quality content to really satisfy that type of curiosity is a little bit hard to me.
The start
My main tech stack relies on js, so the title really got me, after searching more about it I've found it's online version here. It features built-in text editor and interpreter, where the necessary code to complete the exercises can be run, and (most of) it is free. I kinda really liked it, and decided to read it.
The first three chapters
The first three chapters of the book gets back to the basics of js, but I wouldn't recommend skipping them, since even though people who have done basic coding in js should know a great part of it, it sure introduces different concepts that I've know until the time I read them.
From chapter 4 to 7
Chapter 4
I'll talk about chapter 4 specifically because it introduces some features of the book that I've just loved. Instead of just talking about the concept, the author chooses a approach to create fun and ludicrous stories, then he somehow actually associate the story with the concept, in my opinion it really enriched the book because it just makes the book easier to read, in this chapter you will learn about the weresquirrel. I'm not saying the book is easy to comprehend, because I don't really think, but is hard in a good way. Also in this chapter, the author starts to talk about some concepts very important to functional programming, even though this is not a functional programming book, at least not until chapter 11.
The other ones
For those who already did at least a little bit of research in functional programming, know that at least a little bit of higher-order function which are the topic of chapter 5, there is a lot of things that reminds of functional programming in this book, I don't know it in later chapters it will actually introduce the chapter, but I did not expect those things to be there. Chapter 6 may be the chapter that I've learnt most in this book, every other time I've tried to understand object orientation in js I always thought of it as something a little clunky, after this chapter I think a little bit better of it now. Chapter 7 introduces the first project of the book, I already advise to any possible readers, that there is a great jump of complexity here, this was the first chapter that I had to re-read, but re-reading doesn't really fell bad in this book, the stories made by the author makes the process less painful.
Chapter 8 to 11
Chapter 8 for me was the last "easy" chapter of the book that I've read, but it actually is about a very important topic which is error handling. The next chapter is about regular expressions, so it can be a little frustrating it was another chapter that I've learned a great deal, previously I would almost never take a regexp approach to a problem, but after it I feel a little more comfortable. Chapter 10 was quite surprising for me, I did not expect to learn how require() and module.exports works, but I did.
Chapter 11
The last chapter I've read till now, and boy this was painful. The story background of this chapter is really funny, and I've loved it but it is hard to love this chapter as I just couldn't get it. This was by far the chapter that I just had to keep re-reading it felt like I was back to linear algebra of how hard it was for me, can't really explain why, but as the author says "When you are struggling to follow the book, do not jump to any conclusions about your own capabilities. You are fine—you just need to keep at it. Take a break, reread some material, and make sure you read and understand the example programs and exercises. Learning is hard work, but everything you learn is yours and will make subsequent learning easier."
My opinion on the book until now
If you have read the post it should be clear that I really liked the book, there is so many mixed feelings to have reading it, the funny, the javascripts puns, the difficult topics all of it makes this a great book in my opinion.
I'm a junior developer, and my posts don't try to be more than a junior developer opinion. If you disagree, please comment I'll be happy to learn.
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