The ultimate learn-by-doing approach
Written for beginners, useful for experienced developers who want to sharpen their skills and don't mind covering some ground they already know. (Feel free to skip early chapters that cover elementary topics like alerts, variables, and strings). Step-by-step, you learn the fundamentals of JavaScript as well as some advanced concepts including constructors and prototypes.
The book is extremely user-friendly. It assumes no programming experience. Chapters cover only as much as the average learner can absorb in ten minutes, so you're never asked to eat an elephant. Explanations are in plain, nontechnical English that people of all backgrounds can readily understand. With ample coding examples and illustrations.
The most important part: free, online, interactive exercises paired with each chapter. Cognitive research shows that retention increases 400 percent when learners are challenged to retrieve the information they just read. You'll spend two to three times as long practicing as reading. When you code incorrectly, you'll get as many do-overs as you need, until you know it cold.
Testing showed that books and courses load up the reader with far too much information at a time. So I divide up the information into little chunks that won't overwhelm you.
A book on coding doesn't have to be written in impenetrable legalese. It can actually be human-readable. My book is.
People often learn best through examples, so I provide plenty of them.
Most important, before you have a chance to forget what you've read in the book, I ask you to fire up your desktop or laptop (not your mobile device) and head over to my website, where you run a set of interactive exercises, practicing everything you've learned—until you're sure you've mastered it.
Readers tell me they often start the exercises thinking they've learned the latest lesson, and quickly find out they're still a little shaky on it. The automated exercise manager protects you against this common learner delusion. It keeps you at it until your overconfidence becomes real confidence—confidence that's based on your excellent performance. There are 1,750 exercises in all. They're all interactive, with an automated answer-checker that corrects your missteps and points you in the right direction when you stumble. And they're all free.
Thousands of readers have filled out feedback forms telling me that the combination of the book and interactive exercises is involving, fun, frustration-free, addictive, confidence-building, and...well, read the reviews.
A few years ago I set out to teach myself JavaScript by reading programming books. It was such a struggle that I decided I must have lost some learning ability over the years. Then it hit me... I wasn't a bad learner. The books were bad teachers! I fought my way through a dozen books, and by brute effort, learned JavaScript. But I had to design exercises for myself. Without practice, I couldn't retain anything. JavaScript, I learned, isn't that hard. The books make it hard. So I wrote a book that makes JavaScript easy. And, since exercises are the only way to make the knowledge stick, I programmed 1,750 of them for you. I'm a former lecturer in the Communications School of Boston University. I hold an A.B. from Harvard. My professional focus is on using technology to reduce the effort and tedium of learning, primarily through interactivity. I'm developing the "A Smarter Way to Learn" series on programming, a collection of instructional books paired with online interactive exercises. I run the website http: //www.ASmarterWayToLearn.com. Along with my wife Judy and our two politically-active cats, I live in Taos, NM, where I cook under the ghostly supervision of Marcella Hazan, read extensively, play showboat frisbee once a week, and long for more episodes of "Breaking Bad."
