Modest JS Works | You were never sold on heavy-handed JavaScript approaches. Here’s a case for keeping your JS modest.

The fat JavaScript stacks-du-jour have a lot of appeal. They promise you to be able to do more with less. But what if I want to do less?

This is a terrific little (free!) online book all about modest JavaScript. The second part has practical code, but it’s the first part—all about the principles of staying lean—that really resonates with me.

Don’t build more JS than you can maintain over the long term. If you’re going to be building something for a long time, make sure what you are building will grow with you. Make sure you don’t depend on other people’s work too much, lest you want to keep refactoring your code when the framework you picked goes out of style.

Modest JS Works | You were never sold on heavy-handed JavaScript approaches. Here’s a case for keeping your JS modest.

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Web UI Engineering Book - toheeb.com

I like the way this work-in-progress is organised—it’s both a book and a personal website that’ll grow over time.

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Web Browser Engineering

It’s heavy on computer science, but this is a fascinating endeavour. It’s a work-in-progress book that not only describes how browsers work, but invites you to code along too. At the end, you get a minimum viable web browser (and more knowledge than you ever wanted about how browsers work).

As a black box, the browser is either magical or frustrating (depending on whether it is working correctly or not!). But that also make a browser a pretty unusual piece of software, with unique challenges, interesting algorithms, and clever optimizations. Browsers are worth studying for the pure pleasure of it.

See how the sausage is made and make your own sausage!

This book explains, building a basic but complete web browser, from networking to JavaScript, in a thousand lines of Python.

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These are my jams · Paul Robert Lloyd

I like how Paul has recreated his own version of This Is My Jam and I really like how he’s done it with an HTML web component.

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Responsible JavaScript, A Book Apart

TAKE MY MONEY!!!

If we want people to fully experience the sites we have worked so hard to craft, then we must be judicious in our use of JavaScript. In thoughtful detail, Jeremy Wagner shows how JavaScript can be used to progressively enhance server-side functionality, while improving speed and access for more visitors. By centering user needs every step of the way—from toolchains to metrics to testing—we can all contribute to a more inclusive, accessible, and resilient web.

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Responsible JavaScript

I cannot wait for this book (apart) by Jeremy Wagner to arrive—it’s gonna be sooooo good!

Increasing the amount of JavaScript we ship results in poor user experiences, and the iron law of our work is that users must come first. Our preferences and comfort as developers are secondary.

That’s a mission to take to heart while we figure out how we can use JavaScript more responsibly in an industry that relies on it more than ever — and I think that Responsible JavaScript — a carefully written book that the talented people at A Book Apart have worked with me to publish — can help you along the way.

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