Maintainable JavaScript: Writing Readable Code: Zakas, Nicholas C.: 9781449327682: Amazon.com: Books

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You may have definite ideas about writing code when working alone, but team development requires that everyone use the same approach. With the JavaScript practices in this book―including code style, programming tips, and automation―you will learn how to write maintainable code that other team members can easily understand, adapt, and extend.

Author Nicholas Zakas assembled this collection of best practices as a front-end tech leader at Yahoo!, after completing his own journey from solo hacker to team player. He also includes rules recommended by other industry authorities. Use these tips and techniques to help your team set aside individual preferences and function at a higher level.

Establish specific code conventions for your team
Use tools such as JSLint and JSHint to keep your team on track
Adopt style guidelines, such as basic formatting, to help your team produce uniform code
Apply several programming practices to solve problems and improve code quality
Create an automated JavaScript build system using a variety of utilities
Integrate browser-based JavaScript testing with tools such as the YUI Test Selenium Driver

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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Nicholas C. Zakas is a front-end consultant, author, and speaker. He worked at Yahoo! for almost five years, where he was front-end tech lead for the Yahoo! homepage and a contributor to the YUI library. He is the author of Professional JavaScript for Web Developers (Wrox, 2012), Professional Ajax (Wrox, 2007), and High Performance JavaScript (O’Reilly, 2010). Nicholas is a strong advocate for development best practices including progressive enhancement, accessibility, performance, scalability, and maintainability. He blogs regularly at http://www.nczonline.net/ and can be found on Twitter via @slicknet.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ O'Reilly Media
Publication date ‏ : ‎ July 3, 2012
Edition ‏ : ‎ 1st
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Print length ‏ : ‎ 238 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1449327680
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1449327682
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 14.2 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7 x 0.56 x 9.19 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #4,749,965 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,092 in JavaScript Programming (Books)
- #5,435 in Computer Programming Languages
- #11,994 in Programming Languages (Books)

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Nicholas C. Zakas

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Nicholas C. Zakas is a front-end consultant who specializes in user interface design and implementation for web applications using JavaScript, Dynamic HTML, CSS, XML, and XSLT. Has has 15 years of web development experience and spent nearly five years at Yahoo! in various roles, including principal front end engineer for the Yahoo! homepage and contributor to the Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) library, having written the Cookie Utility, Profiler, and YUI Test.

Nicholas is the author of Professional JavaScript for Web Developers and High Performance JavaScript, a co-author on Professional Ajax, and a contributor to Even Faster Web Sites. He has also written for several online sites such as WebReference, Sitepoint, the YUI Blog, A List Apart, and the Web Performance Advent Calendar.

Nicholas regularly gives talks about web development, JavaScript, and best practices. He has given talks at companies such as Yahoo!, LinkedIn, Google, Netflix, TripAdvisor, and NASA, and conferences such as the Ajax Experience, the Rich Web Experience, OSCON, WebDirections, Fronteers, and Velocity.

Through his writing and speaking, Nicholas seeks to teach others the valuable lessons he’s learned while working on some of the most popular and demanding web applications in the world. He firmly believes that no difficult problem should need to be solved more than once.

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Igor
Useful read for team working on big JavaScript projects
Reviewed in the United States on October 7, 2013
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

This book is must read for every team that is working on bigger JavaScript project. The author
has that kind of experience, he worked in the development of the Yahoo page and explains what
practices should be followed in order the code to be scalable, readable and maintainable.

If you are experienced developer you may know the most of this stuff. I have experience in OO programing
but I am relatively new in JavaScript so this book helped me to understand some practices and principles
that are specific for JavaScript. In my opinion the part where the configuration for build, documentation
tools is explained can be shorten because you have the specific tool documentation for that.

If JavaScript team reads this book before beginning of the project and implements the advices and practices
written here it will have much easier job later in the project.

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Rob von Nesselrode
Great practical material
Reviewed in the United States on May 19, 2013
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
This book works well as a supplement to other more technical JavaScript books. It is an easy read that had me checking bits of my code as a result. Like others, such as "JavaScript: The Good Parts" by Douglas Crockford, you don't need to read front-to-back as the sections are self-contained and well indexed.

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yahsflame
I wish every FED would read this book.
Reviewed in the United States on October 25, 2016
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
Zakas is easily one of the best figures in front-end development, and specifically JavaScript. I recommend all of his books and various youtube videos as well. Heck, I even found him on front-end masters, and continue to learn from his easy to understand approach to grasping some very difficult concepts.

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James Jeffers
An excellent guide to practicing better habits.
Reviewed in the United States on January 26, 2013
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
Few books leave you feeling tangibly better at practicing a computer language. This book is one of them. If you're not sure whether or not you have good habits and a good process for working on javascript projects, you will after completing this book.

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2 people found this helpful

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Henry
good introductory book
Reviewed in the United States on March 21, 2014
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
Very good introductory to style guides. Also read "clean code" if you want more in depth style guidelines and don't have trouble reading java code.

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Martin Family
Not the book I was expecting but a nice reference for how to write code
Reviewed in the United States on July 23, 2013
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
I wanted something with a few more real world examples but I found the book to be like an english primer. telling me how the code should be written but with very basic examples that don get into the more complicated scenarios. If you are knew, read this to know how to format what you write and structure for longevity of the code base but don't expect to learn how to "write" code with it.

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Blue Gal
Learn about JavaScript and code organization for any language
Reviewed in the United States on January 22, 2013
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
Very concise and easy to read. Lots of great organization tips to think about when writing in any language plus lots of JavaScript details that I had no idea about having mainly learned JavaScript through examples.

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Manju
Good reference to develop clean and maintainable javascript code.
Reviewed in the United States on July 5, 2012
Format: Paperback
"Maintainable JavaScript" by Nicholas Zakas (O'Reilly 2012) is a very useful book for programmers who have just started writing javascript code or, for intermediate developers who would like to develop clean and maintainable code. The book is written in a very simple language that is easy to understand and follow.

As the title of the book suggests, the book is aimed at capturing the essential aspects of writing javascript code that is easy to maintain. I liked the flow of the book but I felt that the first few chapters in part 1 could be skipped if the reader is aware of the material.

In part 1 of the book (Style Guidelines), Zakas has given in-depth analysis of styling guidelines to follow that are sometimes skipped when writing large pieces of Javascript code. He touches upon styling guidelines such as: naming conventions, adding comments in the code, understanding the usage of semi-colons etc.,. Some good example use cases and the methodology of using the style guides is presented so that these ideas stick in your mind and become part of the programmers habits.

In part 2 (Programming Practices) - I especially liked the chapter 6 on `avoid global variables' since I have used global variables in my JavaScript but did not think through the caveats of using them. Similar to part 1 of the book, I liked the use cases that the author proposed to describe advantages and disadvantages of several programming aspects that are described in the section. In addition,one of the best described chapters in this section is the material on throwing your own errors (helping you to debug JavaScript code) which I do most of the time using firebug tool on Firefox. Even though this method works I might have to start using some of the techniques described by Zakas in the book, using fascade design pattern on top of objects that are not yours (very interesting outlook) etc.

Part 3 - I like this section a lot especially the material on minification, compression of JavaScript files as the script code adds time delay in loading of the page on the browser. Compression, minification techniques described by the author will definitely help with improving the load performance of the page in the browser.

Some of other things that would have helped me or any other intermediate JavaScript developer is inclusion of example or exercise files for some sections in `part 2'. Examples and exercise files would have helped the understanding of chapters 10, 11 and some sections in part 3 like chapter 17.

It is also interesting to know that author did make an attempt to include Html5 changes for JavaScript in some chapters of part 2 of the book.

I would recommend this book if you are an intermediate developer like me or novice developer for JavaScript code and would like to work towards methods for improving your code and writing a maintainable javascript code as this is book easy to understand and follow.

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nockedlee76
Five Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 5, 2017
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Very good book!

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Willy Van den Driessche
How to write good JavaScript and how to organize your code
Reviewed in France on September 27, 2012
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
I particularily liked this book. The author is a JavaScript veteran who has gone through all anti-patterns himself. The books teaches you a lot of reasonable conventions to stick to. In most of the cases the author carefully explains why doing it this or that way is actually the best idea. One of the shocking things is his advice "don't test aginst null". But if you read the chapter then it all makes sense. I actually learned a lot about the language while reading this book. I still don't like the language but now I can see how smart peaople have established conventions around the sometimes idiotic rules of the language. Finally, this book also talks about tools you can use to automate the testing and buildingof your Javascript files.

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Jo Segers
Very good
Reviewed in Germany on December 16, 2013
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
This is a must read for any javascript programmer.

Its is written in a style that allows easy reading and everything is explained with good examples.

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Racchio
Utilissimo per i principianti.
Reviewed in Italy on August 4, 2015
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
Questo libro è breve, conciso ed utilissimo. Non vi insegnerà il linguaggio ma i modi migliori per scrivere codice pulito, leggibile e mantenibile. Se siete principianti vi sarà utilissimo e anche se siete esperti potrebbe darvi qualche interessante dritta.

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5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars

4.0 out of 5 stars How to write good JavaScript and how to organize your code

5.0 out of 5 stars Very good

5.0 out of 5 stars Utilissimo per i principianti.

Five Stars

How to write good JavaScript and how to organize your code

Very good

Utilissimo per i principianti.