My new JavaScript book

Buy it on Amazon

The paperback version of JS glossary on demand is finally available in both Amazon.uk and Amazon.com.

Feel free to use the Look inside feature to read first pages and judge upfront.

the A5 paperback version of my JS glosary on demand book is now live on lulu \o/ https://t.co/4cUd2w1pnn pic.twitter.com/rXxek3TeAp

— Andrea Giammarchi (@WebReflection) February 25, 2016

During the last year I have been training various kind of people with very different skills: absolute beginners to professionals already working in the Web development field.

Despite their programming knowledge being of different levels, I’ve noticed some sort of constant while teaching both classes and singular individuals: they were capable of easily understanding any topic, concept, or code example, as long as they knew already each technical term used to explain such topics … and trust me: this is not as obvious as it sounds.

the biggest difficulty I have as autodidact through online material, is that I don’t fully understand what they are talking about. I don’t understand their terminology!

Above sentence was a reply from one of my students at the following question:

“Do you follow anyone or do you read online articles?“

I’ve asked an example to better investigate and we went after through that, with me explaining everything that wasn’t clear, useful to also understand his level. Later, he told me:

what’s missing is something trivial to read, possibly compact, for people like me, to quickly ramp up so that becomes easy to further follow online material

That is the day the special JavaScript glossary on demand book idea came out.

What’s different about this book

Based on an innovative and unusual approach, this book could somehow be compared to a waterfall: it starts quietly, by describing simple basic terms, and then accelerates until it covers most modern features towards the end.

Rather than explaining every part of the JavaScript programming language by generic topics, this book approach is to explain technical words “on demand“ when needed, in order to complete simple to complex tasks.

It doesn’t matter if you know absolutely nothing about JS or you know a bit more and you would like to catch up with modern JavaScript techniques, this book explains through examples basic concepts as well as most complex and modern one.

As side note, this book pagination has been hand crafted to fit properly US paper format without ever splitting in pieces code or paragraphs. I know this won’t look that good on some device, but the paper version should hopefully be awesome!

Tested in the real world

Most examples and explanations have been used during my trainings and people got them and improved quite a lot. JavaScript application boundaries are these days wider than ever, it is nearly impossible to cover with a single book all topics but here what you should focus on: learn what’s most important so that you can explore and learn much more by your own!

Grammar and Technical Editors

Many thanks to Stoyan Stefanov for helping me reviewing code and examples and a special thank to Cinzia Giammarchi who’ve been patient enough to fix all my gross English mistakes: I owe you both!

New challenges ahead

Now that everyone can easily learn basic to modern JavaScript terms and concepts, I feel like my job in the training field is mostly completed and I can happily move forward.

Indeed, during these months I’ve realized that I do like teaching people about the Web and my favorite programming language, but I also love way more being involved in creating and shipping crazy new advanced products, something hard to achieve during regular training sessions due constant amount of basics that most people need to learn first.

Accordingly, I’ll still be available for training courses of all levels at your company, but I’ve dropped my London’s office so I won’t organize face to face anymore.

Last, but not least, training in these months has been one of the most interesting experiences I’ve ever had and I’d like to thank all people that have learned from me: you nailed it!

I hope I’ve been a good teacher for the little time it lasted.