Monthly Book Roundup (August 2014)
This month was a JavaScript focused one that includes two absolutely outstanding books.
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Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja
This is an amazingly good book. It explained some of the more complex aspects of JavaScript (like scope, closures, and function invocation) in such a clear way. It definitely provided me with plenty of insight about the language and some powerful tools and strategies to use.
A common refrain for the book was also "this would be really straightforward, but IE..." and it really gave me a window into how difficult a task developing jQuery was for John Resig (one of the authors). It was really interesting seeing how jQuery and other libraries dealt with some of the browser JavaScript inconsistencies.
There are some pretty advanced examples within this book but they tend to be broken down and explained really well. I don't know if it'll qualify you to be a JavaScript ninja, but it certainly will give you plenty of idea and tools to use in your development.
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AngularJS Up & Running
This is hands down the best AngularJS book I've read and one I'd definitely recommend for people new to AngularJS or those with more experience.
It references a really recent version of AngularJS (1.2.19) and talked about some features I really wasn't aware of. The style of the code is also consistent with Todd Motto's Opinionated AngularJS styleguide for teams , so this is a book that really reflects a lot of current AngularJS best practices.
This book is written by the same authors of the original O'Reilly AngularJS book, but this book fills in a lot of gaps left in that book. I thought it was a nice touch to have a separate chapter on testing for controllers, services and directives right after they are introduced. That makes more sense to me than just having a huge chapter on testing stuck at the end of the book.
I highly recommend this book to anyone doing (or interested in doing) AngularJS development.
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