(Must READ) Book for every new and experienced web designer/developer. As an experienced full-stack web developer and instructor for more than 8 years, this is one of the most usable and skill developer books about JavaScript that I have ever seen. You should have previous exposure to JavaScript/CSS/HTML and some Ajax concepts and if you have Back-end technology on hand as well, it will help you to get the most out of the concepts covered in this book. I love the flow of information, relevant and clean code examples and explanations.

There is no escape from learning advanced JavaScript techniques and tools unless you decide to work as anything else but not Web industry expert. Forget about everything you knew about JavaScript since 10 years ago, This programming language has been changed a lot and is not a simple-to-ignore technology anymore. If you are a serious web expert (or want to be), use quality materials available in the market.This book is one of them without any doubt.

I am still reading the book and I have to say that so far I have enjoyed it. Even for a relatively new javascript programmer, this book is excellent in catching concepts that are ignored in most other web development books, primarily because it considers JS as a full fledge language which is the correct approach to explain javascript. That being said, a mastery of any object oriented programming language such as Java definitely helps to grasp the concepts explained in this book.

Its a good buy, and I highly recommend it. Appreciate the author's sense of humor every once in a while - its like a team member actually explaining stuff to you during code reviews :)

I really like the way this book is written. You will have no problems with reading it cover to cover if you are a little familiar with javascript. Even though I have written a fair amount of javascript code and used jquery and other popular js libraries, still I did learn a lot. The examples are amazing. They are really clearly discussed, and I believe it is due to Bierault's technical writing chops.

This book gives great insight into the working of functions and closures in Javascript.

What is nice is that every bit of theory is accompanied with some code examples from libaries like jQuery or Prototype, and the examples are explained very well.

One minor negative point is that there are also a lot of pages in the book which are dedicated to deprecated statements like 'eval' and 'with'. It's nice to know how they work, but you shouldn't use them anyway so an entire chapter for each of them seems like too much attention.

This is a really brilliant book that clearly explains WHY JavaScript has become the first choice for developing web applications on both client and server. The subtleties and nuances of closures and function based capability are carefully and clearly explained with lots of examples that you can run and explore.

The title and Ninja theme may seem a little silly, but don't be fooled. This is a serious and brilliantly conceived and executed tour of this powerful development language.

One respect where the title is accurate in that this book is about coding Javascript directly, _not_ about coding to the interface of any library (like jQuery) that rides on top of Javascript. I found the explanations of "closures", of _exactly_ what it means for functions to be "first-class objects", and of function names and anonymous functions, very enlightening ...perhaps the best parts of the book.

I was somewhat hoping for a whole lot of nuggets for improving the conciseness and clarity and performance of my coding style, perhaps showing how best to take advantage of the structure of the language, or how best to code recurring structures such as looping.. But that isn't the focus of the book. A few gems are indeed spun off in the process of covering other topics, but there aren't oodles of them.

Disagreement with other Javascript luminaries, and with the direction of Javascript standards development, is often ignored or underplayed or muted. Although there is obvious potential for disagreement, controversy is definitely not the book's zeitgeist.

The book largely skirts the issue of Javascript being more "object oriented". There's a clear statement that at root Javascript is _not_ object-oriented, and a strong hint this isn't necessarily a bad thing. Also, some simple tricks for making Javascript _seem_ much more object-oriented than it appears at first glance are presented briefly in scattered locations. But there the coverage ends, without any theoretical underpinning nor in-depth discussion nor even any strong opinions.

Although two authors are listed, this is basically John Resig's book. A very few paragraphs did hint at tag-team authoring. But I suspect (but don't know for sure:-) mostly the publisher added the second author in exasperation over finally getting the book finished and out after almost five years.

The book isn't real clear just who its audience is: maintenance coders? creators of libraries? language nerds? The good thing about this ambiguity is the topics covered range more widely than expected.

Much of the second half of the book is various nitty-gritty details about coding around all the cross-browser and language-version and interpreter-implementation issues one runs into. Specific examples of the various quirks and workarounds were sometimes so bizarre it was clear there'd be little chance of an individual ever solving them. My overall takeaway from the second half of the book was that in almost all cases one should code to some sort of covering library (like jQuery) that handles all the quirks in a transparent way, rather than to Javascript directly. (I also picked up the suggestion Javascript would be easier in some future where IE6/IE7/IE8/IE9 have only insignificant market share.)

(Readers from different backgrounds will of course see the book very differently, so let me describe my own background: I'm a retired programmer who professionally used other languages exclusively and whose only acquaintance with Javascript comes from home use. I do have extensive experience with the related C though; for example I'm quite comfortable with and routinely use the difference between pre-increment and post-increment. I'm not a computer language nerd, nor even someone with a relatively good coding style overall. On the other hand, I was already fairly comfortable with some of the more obscure details of various Javascript implementations.)

This book is heavily concentrated on explaining why JavaScript is a functional programming language and how that can be used by the developer. The half of the book is dedicated to JavaScript functions, there is everything you will need to know about JavaScript functions: anonymous functions, recursions, inline named function ans so on.

The other half of the book explains everything that you will need to develop well structured JavaScript code.

The only remark I have for this book is about the 'Regular Expressions' chapter, in my opinion it is not written very clear and can be confusing, but it is fer to say that the authors are suggesting additional literature for getting familiar with regular expressions.

Big plus is that all the source code form the book examples is very well structured and packed in zip file that enables you to quickly try the examples on computer.

Very good book for everyone interested in Javascript. It gives a good overview on how to write a good JS code. It's a must-have book for every webdeveloper. The good thing is focus on testing the code author wrote in the examples inside the book. It teaches how to perform unit testing of javascript code.

Sure shot way to go from novice to ninja ! Enjoying every moment with it ! Supplement this book with Douglas Crockford's "JavaScript, The Good Parts" and you'd have covered all possible language features of the language.

Pour tout ceux qui veulent en savoir plus sur ce langage qui peut être le meilleur ami du dev web (comme son pire cauchemar:))

Not a book for begginers, you can read it to became a JavaScript ninja. Not so hard, you don't need to be a JavaScript advanced programmer to understand it.

But if you are an high skill programmer, you can read it to clarify and order concepts.

It is a great javascript book. Is not for beginner.

It is a deep tour on closure, JS object and inheritance.

It is well written and with clear examples.

It is he best book I have ever read on JS.

This book provides a great intermediate to advanced coverage of Javascript. (I don't recommend it for absolute beginners). I've also read "Javascript the good parts" by Douglas Crockford, which good but quite short and made the reader work hard to fill in the gaps / understand the examples. Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja is much easier reading and covers the material at a more leisurely pace.