Book Review: Eloquent JavaScript

Eloquent JavaScript by Marijn Haverbeke is a great book for both beginner and intermediate developers to learn and improve their existing JavaScript skills. The second and most recent edition covers ECMAScript 5. The ebook can be read online and is free to download in ePub & PDF formats (you can have Amazon convert it into Kindle format). There is a also a paper edition available for purchase.

The explanations are simple and straight-forward with plenty of code snippets and practical samples in VanillaJS that you can re-use in your own projects. It made me think and answered a lot of "whys". The chapter summaries are also well-written. The style of the book & the terse code samples reminded of my favorite C# book C# in a Nutshell. I have heavily highlighted points in both the books for future reference and to me they exemplify how technical books should be written.

The only nit I can pick is not with the content but with the formatting of the code in the PDF version. Due to unwanted spaces within the code, you cannot copy & paste the sample as is if you want to try them out. I had to use the code samples from the online HTML version. The code samples for only a few chapters are available for download at the author's code sandbox but this isn't really an issue.