Pro JavaScript Design Patterns hits the shelves
Today is an exciting day as my book has finally arrived and now available in stores. For those of you who have pre-ordered the book, your copy is on its way shortly. For anyone else, if you have an interest in software design patterns and want extend your knowledge on professional JavaScript development by applying these principles and techniques to the JavaScript language; look no further, and buy our book written by yours truly and Yahoo! Frontend Engineer, Ross Harmes.
Having been fascinated by Design Patterns mid 2005, that makes this book almost two years in the making as I was always eager to try and apply these patterns into the JavaScript language. With that in mind, a lot of thought, discussion, prototypes and proof of concepts were put into the authoring of this book which is why this will be a near timeless classic for the JavaScript language and an essential for the modern frontend programmer to add to his or her JavaScript repertoire seasoning.
Cheers to a happy launch and hope everyone is having a great holiday season.
December 11th, 2007 at 2:11 am
Congratulations, Dustin - looking forward to getting my hands on a copy of your book! :)
December 11th, 2007 at 2:46 am
I’ve learnt so very much from your site here, and design patterns have recently been brought to my attention by a very talented C# programmer. This will be the first tech book I will buy in almost a decade (the last one was O’Reilly’s “JavaScript - The Definitive Guide, 3rd Edition”). Welcome to my bookshelf, Mr. Diaz.
December 11th, 2007 at 5:18 am
Will it be available in Italy? :)
I tell you: if I don’t like it I’ll want my money back! :D
December 11th, 2007 at 5:33 am
Please sell a PDF version. If I pdf version was available I would have taken out my credit card immediately!
December 11th, 2007 at 5:38 am
Opps, I see apress is selling and “e-book”. Is this a pdf? DRM?
December 11th, 2007 at 6:14 am
Congrats Dustin, I plan to purchase the book soon.
December 11th, 2007 at 8:21 am
Congrats!
Adding to my amazon wishlist.
December 11th, 2007 at 8:35 am
Congrats, dude! That’s awesome news.
I think that picture is the first time I’ve ever seen you without a beanie… I totally understand if you didn’t want to go with that whole “beanie and book” cliché… maybe you should start a new nekkid trend!
December 11th, 2007 at 12:24 pm
Looking forward to the movie.
December 11th, 2007 at 2:40 pm
@Jonno: The E-book will be available shortly on the Apress website.
@H5N1: It should be available to Italy if you have an italian Amazon. But if you’re asking if it’s going to be translated in Italian, that’s highly unlikely at this moment in time.
@Matthew: I sent a copy to Tiff for the Digital Web staff. Hopefully we’ll see a review over there soon enough :)
@Freddy: Glad to be on your shelf. That’s pretty cool.
December 11th, 2007 at 3:07 pm
Got mine yesterday. Loving it so far!
December 11th, 2007 at 7:08 pm
Cool! Well done Dustin! (I think this is one I will get…or at least put on ‘my wishlist’ to get!)
December 12th, 2007 at 9:14 am
Any plans to release a sample chapter?
December 12th, 2007 at 12:41 pm
I ordered it a few days ago. If I’m really lucky it will arrive before my Christmas holidays ;-).
December 12th, 2007 at 9:04 pm
The book should be arriving fairly quickly if you got it from Amazon. Also, there will be sample chapters available on various blogs and webzines. Stay tuned for those.
December 13th, 2007 at 2:27 am
One thing to note again, the PDF version is now available again on the Apress website.
December 16th, 2007 at 8:58 pm
I’m sold Dustin, i convinced my partner to order me a copy last night for Xmas i just hope it arrives sooner rather than later.
It was either yours or a PHP/MySql bible, and you won :)
December 17th, 2007 at 11:35 am
I got my copy a couple days ago from Amazon (I pre-ordered). I just got into the 2nd chapter so I still have a lot to read.
So for so good though. I wish I could sneak off into a conference room and finish the book.
December 17th, 2007 at 2:12 pm
Looks like mine will be shipping to me tomorrow. Should be fun.
December 21st, 2007 at 12:58 pm
@h5n1: if you want i gonna translate it :D
I just kid, but I surelly buy this book, and now
I’m trying to make my boss to buy a copy..
:D
December 28th, 2007 at 7:49 am
I’ve read the book rather quickly in the past two days. The first part, Object-Oriented JavaScript, I like a lot. Unfortunately, the second part, Design Patterns, doesn’t live up to it. That’s from my point of view, of course, and with the background that I know the original GOF patterns fairly well almost since they were published. For JavaScript programmers who haven’t been exposed to these patterns that part of the book is a good introduction.
What I would have liked to see are pattern implementations that make use of prototypal inheritance. This form of inheritance, although introduced in part 1 alongside classical inheritance, is not used in part 2. For one thing, it would have been interesting to see how this rather special feature of JavaScript can be put to use.
Beyond the merely interesting, prototypal inheritance might offer ways to circumvent a typical problem with the usual, classical pattern implementations. These are mostly based on delegation and thereby incur the problem of “loss of self”. Say you use a decorator to adorn a method. Now when that method is called through the decorator, the additional decoration is invoked. But when the same method is called internally from another method, and therefore not going through the decorator, the decoration is not invoked. A decorator that works by manipulating the prototype chain might be able to circumvent the problem by avoiding any ambiguity regarding what ‘this’ means.
Concerning the Bridge Pattern I’m still nonplussed. Yes, the description is somehow related to the GOF original, but the GOF Bridge is essentially based on delegation — its AKA is “Handle/Body” — whereas the book version is about something rather different. Abstraction, API design, or something like that.
Squabbles aside, I think it is a good book, but I had hopes for something different.
February 21st, 2008 at 9:46 am
Hey Dustin,
I have ordered your book from Amazon because I was very interested in the Flyweight Design Pattern.
It would have been nice to see examples with performance results. Basically drivers that will show how the js library is called from a basic HTML page.
Maybe you can put them on your website soon :)
June 16th, 2008 at 5:35 pm
This book has helped me tremendously…making simple tasks simpler and the hard ones easy enough to understand.
June 30th, 2008 at 11:20 am
I am a server side programmer and this book has really helped me see how far I can push JavaScript on our platform, very insightful and saved me a lot of time. Just wanted to say thanks !
Stan Brower