Channels ▼

Developer Reading List: The Must-Have Books for JavaScript

Andrew Binstock, February 12, 2013 The best books for learning the basics, becoming expert, and and writing complete apps in JavaScript
  • E-mail
  • Print
  • ShareShare

Performance

Pro JavaScript Performance, by Tom Barker

JavaScript performance used to be a really serious problem, but the advances in the various engines and virtual machines have greatly improved responsiveness of Web apps that rely on JavaScript. This book and the next look at what else can be done to boost performance. The above title focuses on tools that do all kinds of nifty tricks to boost JavaScript: minifying the JS, using the YUI compressor, and Google's closure compiler, among others. It also spends a lot of time on Web monitoring tools and interpreting the results. It's a short, highly tactical, and highly hands-on treatment on finding the most ways to reduce latency.

High-Performance JavaScript, by Nicholas Zakas

While the previous title is all hands on, this book steps back and looks at performance more holistically. It discusses in detail where bottlenecks are likely to occur and then explains what can be done about them. It eventually follows through to specific tips, but these are presented in the context of the larger discussion, rather than the previous volume, which simply shows them one right after the other.

Both books are short and useful and I would suggest to readers who are greatly concerned about performance that they buy both titles. I would start my reading with the Zakas book and then proceed to the Barker Title.


INFO-LINK




Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

Dr. Dobb's encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, Dr. Dobb's moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing or spam. Dr. Dobb's further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

 
Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.