A Body Without a Soul

undefined and NaN are not constants.  They are global variables, and you can change their values.  That should not be possible, and yet it is.  Don’t do it.

I kinda-sorta used to work with Doug Crockford.  That is, he worked for a company that bought the company I worked for; they ended up abandoning the product they’d been working on and keeping the one we’d developed, but kept their old employees and got rid of the new ones.  But at least I can say I kinda-sorta used to work with Doug Crockford.

I read this book more out of interest in what he thought about JavaScript than out of interest in JavaScript, and that’s a good thing: there’s lots of attitude in here, but little I didn’t already know about JavaScript, even though I wouldn’t consider myself very proficient at JS at all.

There are more railroad diagrams in here than I’ve seen since the Turbo Pascal 5.0 manual.  There were a lot fewer claims in that book that the language it was describing was fundamentally flawed in numerous ways, though.

All that said, this seems like a pretty reasonable, and delightfully short, introduction to JS for people who need to be able to write it but not necessarily read other peoples’ code; since it deliberately gives short shrift to the parts of the language it considers not-good-parts, random code in the wild may use features or mis-features not discussed in detail here.