Learning JavaScript: 52% Complete

I’ve gotten as far as Chapter 11 in the Eloquent JavaScript book, though I haven’t completed the exercises. So far I’d give the book ★★★☆☆. He certainly could’ve gone into more detail in places. I’ve gotten into the habit of asking ChatGPT any questions I have (questionable given its unreliability, I concede).

So far I find JavaScript somewhat compelling. Its messiness reminds me of Perl 5. Its way of having known unreliable behaviors that it’s better to just avoid (such as type coercion) is certainly something I’m not used to. I find its highly permissive evaluation a marked change of pace from Python; it makes me consider whether the ease of triggering an exception in python code is an unusually noisy pattern for a language.

I’m only halfway through the book, and haven’t gotten to the back half of the book that covers JS in the browser; so far I’ve been able to use nodejs on the command line and just pretend JS is a server-side language like any other. That’ll change soon.

I have no familiarity with the JS+HTML+CSS paradigm, and there’s more for me to learn there than half a slim book can teach me. I might have to add a modern web development book to the pile. Becoming a Full-Stack developer is not my goal, but I can’t really say I know JavaScript if, for example, I wouldn’t know how to compose a single-page web application.

31 March 2023