JavaScript: The Good Parts

This Master Class has Concluded

• Get a detailed look at JavaScript's elegant features, including syntax, objects, functions, inheritance, arrays, regular expressions, and methods
• Discover why object-oriented programming in classical, prototypal, and functional styles is unique to JavaScript
• Understand the Document Object Model (DOM) -- the web browser API so crucial to your work
• Improve the quality of your JavaScript code through performance, security, and style
• Learn how to avoid the bad parts of JavaScript, such as global variables and the eval function

Most programming languages contain good and bad parts, but JavaScript has more than its share of the bad, having been developed and then released in a hurry before it could be refined. Once Java applets failed, JavaScript became the language of the Web by default, making its popularity almost completely independent of its qualities as a programming language.

In this Master Class, JavaScript expert Douglas Crockford will scrape away the language’s bad features to reveal all the good ideas that make JavaScript an outstanding object-oriented programming language -- ideas such as functions, loose typing, dynamic objects, and an expressive object literal notation. You’ll learn why this powerful feature subset is more reliable, readable, and maintainable than the language as a whole, and discover firsthand how to create extensible and efficient code with it. Based on his popular O’Reilly book, JavaScript: The Good Parts, this class will demonstrate how JavaScript can be a beautiful, elegant, lightweight, and highly expressive language.

• If you develop sites or applications for the Web, this class is a must, whether you’re managing object libraries or just trying to get Ajax to run faster.

• Douglas Crockford's popular O’Reilly book, JavaScript: The Good Parts