JavaScript Pocket Reference by David Flanagan; O'Reilly

JavaScript Pocket Reference isn't really a dictionary styled reference that I imagined it to be. This book reads more like a O’Reilly book in the Nutshell series than a Reference. It should have been called JavaScript in a Nutshell for this is a distilled & condensed version of the author's immensely popular JavaScript: The Definitive Guide. It is however a well-written book that covers the important parts of JavaScript and the essentials of ECMAScript 5 in less than 300 pages.

This book is like a quick tour of the modern-day JavaScript landscape by an expert guide. The author fills the discourse with interesting facts:

Division by zero is not an error in JavaScript: it simply returns infinity or negative infinity.

...and explains relevant details concisely:

"use strict" does not involve any JavaScript keywords: it is simply a JavaScript string literal expression, and is ignored by ECMAScript 3 interpreters. When placed at the beginning of a script or of a function body, however, it has special meaning to an ECMAScript 5 interpreter.

This is a book that serious JavaScript developers should have handy so that they don't have to be distracted jumping off to look up things in online references.

This review is based on the ebook I received through the O'Reilly Blogger Review Program.

Related:

• JavaScript: The Good Parts - photo gag
• Free JavaScript & jQuery learning resources