The second edition of the Open Web Podcast is now live. In this episode we brought on Brendan Eich and Arun Ranganathan (both of Mozilla) to discuss the recent changes that occurred in the ECMAScript 3.1/ECMAScript 4 processes that resulted in ECMAScript Harmony. This is a dense podcast – going just over an hour.
The podcast is available as an mp3, ogg, an RSS feed, and on iTunes.
Next week we’re hoping to bring on some people from the Microsoft JScript team to discuss the recent changes and how they plan on implementing them in Internet Explorer. The topic isn’t clear for the week after that, but we’ll probably want to get back to discussing HTML 5 of the new Open Web Foundation.
Also, we now have a dedicated site for the podcast: openwebpodcast.com.
SXSW 2009
I’ve submitted two talks to South by Southwest 2009 – naturally both on JavaScript. If these talks interest you please feel free to vote on them appropriately. Last year there were a lot of complaints concerning the lack of technical talks – I hope to rectify that this year.
More Secrets of JavaScript Libraries
In a reprise from last year’s popular panel – the JavaScript libraries authors are getting together again to impart their what they’ve learned from their experience in developing solid, world-class, JavaScript libraries. Covering everything from advanced aspects of the JavaScript language, to handling cross-browser issues, all the way up to packaging and distribution. A complete set of knowledge for a JavaScript developer.
I plan on having representatives from Dojo, Yahoo UI, and Prototype on the panel (will probably switch up the speakers from last year, just to keep things interesting).
Practical JavaScript Development
Modern JavaScript development can be quite harrowing. With a multitude of browsers to support and a bevy of design and performance considerations – only the best solutions will suffice. In this talk JavaScript developers will be given the best advice for improving the quality of your JavaScript code, writing reusable JavaScript code-bases, and tackling difficult cross-browser situations; providing you with an expert level of knowledge, immediately.
Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja Articles
Work continues on my upcoming book (about halfway done at this point – working on Chapter 10). But in the meantime some article extracts have been released on Ajaxian:
Enjoy! Note that these are only extracts of the larger chapters: Closures and Function Prototypes.
Michaël Lecerf (August 15, 2008 at 1:53 pm)
Hello John,
I’m one of those who already bought your next book, via the Early Access Program of Manning. The first five chapters already learnt me a lot of useful info, this book is going to be a must-have!
I was wondering how I could report typos or small errors I may found. Is the Manning forum OK or would you prefer to be contacted in a more direct way (e.g. via e-mail) ? Or maybe you have some reviewers who already did the job?
Anyway, good luck for the second half or your book. I can’t wait to get the next chapters.
(forgive my possible English mistakes, since I’m not a native speaker)
John Resig (August 15, 2008 at 1:56 pm)
@Michaël: I wouldn’t worry too much about spelling mistakes – the chapters have yet to be proofread. Although if you have a bunch of them feel free to put them up in a forum post and I can work through them. Glad to hear you’re enjoying the book!
Michaël Lecerf (August 15, 2008 at 2:15 pm)
@John:
Thanks for your super-fast answer. In fact, I wasn’t really thinking about spelling mistakes but more about pieces of code.
I’ve seen, for exemple, some
if (!something)when we need the opposite (without the ‘not’) in order to have the code working as expected. Or some!!somethingwhen the conversion in a boolean equivalent of ‘something’ is not necessary.Nothing really important, of course, but some portions of code that may be quite disturbing or not work as expected because of ‘boolean problems’.
John Resig (August 15, 2008 at 2:32 pm)
@Michaël: Absolutely submit those to the forum, I’ll take a look and fix up the code examples. Thanks for the feedback!
Mook (August 16, 2008 at 6:20 am)
For Ch 5 Article 1 (Prototypes):
(Function).prototype is _not_ empty. It has the very important .constructor property, as mentioned around listing 5 – people tend to write Foo.prototype = { … } and end up completely breaking that. (See listing 6, for example) It’s of course DontEnum; see ECMAScript ed.3 section 13.2 steps 9 through 11.
This affects the text around listing 4 – (new Foo).hasOwnProperty(“constructor”) is actually false. It’s up the prototype chain. And combining listings 5 and 6 don’t work – assert((new ninja.constructor) instanceof Ninja) is false if appended after listing 6.
Seeing a JS book coming that treats its audience as actually wanting to write JS is great :)
John Resig (August 16, 2008 at 8:01 am)
@Mook: Thanks for the feedback – I’ll integrate your comments right away. Glad you enjoyed the articles!
Chooping boards (August 18, 2008 at 6:08 am)
Hallo, I read Your Book, is excellence!!
Dmitry Baranovskiy (August 21, 2008 at 2:16 am)
Hi John,
Good luck at S×SW. I voted for you. ????? :)
Sorry for title of my panel at S×SW (JavaScript Ninja Secrets). Honestly, I created it myself and then friends pointed to your book. Looks like I steal it, but I didn’t. If I’ll make it to conference I promise I’ll ask for forgiveness and will recommend your book.
Perry Trolard (August 28, 2008 at 11:24 pm)
Hi John,
Thanks for the chapter previews. Quick question about closures: What’s the difference between your last example, roughly
var jQuery = (function() {
var jQuery = function() {
// initialize
}
return jQuery;
})();
and
var jQuery = function() {
// initialize
}
Thanks again.