Which sections were interesting?
Ch 15. Functions:
- I appreciated the subtle differences between function declarations and expressions. I can see lots of value in naming your functions for debugging purposes, which then seems like function declarations are the way to go vs expressions.
- After coming from ruby, the handling of optional and mandatory parameters in JS seems clunky!
Ch 17. Objects: - I love the flexibility of objects and the many ways of accessing their properties. Performing operations in brackets to access a property? So cool!
Which sections did you totally skim?
Ch 16. Variables
- Initially the section on IIFEs was interesting, but it quickly became not so...nesting the scope of variable is clearly important, but this was some of the dryest reading in the assignments. :(
- Closures via Environments - Too much theory...I read it, but without actually putting some of this theory into practice, I fear that I will not be retaining all of it.
Ch 17. Objects - I may have skimmed the last 1/3 or so of this chapter....until the list of generic methods and the Cheatsheet at the end. Inheritance got confusing. I would love to work through some exercises regarding some of the stuff in this chapter...I think my retention would be better.
Do you think the reading was valuable?
- Something I didn't appreciate about some sections of the reading, is that there are a number of times where a concept or use-case for something is introduced, and the author then quickly pivots and says..., "oh, but you shouldn't do it this way because of this and this...." Why bother to introduce this edge case at all then, if best practice is to not use it. Ex: Use of window for global variables.
- Overall I thought that most of the reading was valuable, but it dove very quickly into some deeper topics. If JS was the first language that you were learning, I would say this would not be the best way to spend your time. I suspect that for someone that already has 2-3 languages under their belt this would be a very quick way to pick up many of these concepts. I fall somewhere in between.
Which topics were notably confusing?
- There are times when the language becomes very dense and hard to follow. The explanations for .call(), .bind(), and .apply() are an example.