A Smarter Way to Learn JavaScript: The new approach that uses technology to cut your effort in half by Mark Myers (PDF)

Description

Learning JavaScript is hell because of two problems.I remove the problems, and you start having fun.The first problem is retention. You remember only ten or twenty percent of what you read. That spells failure. To become fluent in a computer language, you have to retain pretty much everything.How can you retain everything? Only by constantly being asked to play everything back. That’s why people use flashcards. But my system does flashcards one better. After reading a short chapter, you go to my website and complete twenty interactive exercises. Algorithms check your work to make sure you know what you think you know. When you stumble, you do the exercise again. You keep trying until you know the chapter cold. The exercises are free.The second problem is comprehension. Many learners hit a wall when they try to understand advanced concepts like variable scope and prototypes. Unfortunately, they blame themselves. That’s why the Dummies books sell so well. But the fault lies with the authors, coding virtuosos who lack teaching talent. I’m the opposite of the typical software book author. I’ll never code fast enough to land a job at Google. But I can teach.Anyway, most comprehension problems are just retention problems in disguise. If you get lost trying to understand variable scope, it’s because you don’t remember how functions work. Thanks to the interactive exercises on my website, you’ll always understand and remember everything necessary to confidently tackle the next concept.”I’ve signed up to a few sites like Udemy, Codecademy, FreeCodeCamp, Lynda, YouTube videos, even searched on Coursera but nothing seemed to work for me. This book takes only 10 minutes each chapter and after that, you can exercise what you’ve just learned right away!” —Amazon reviewer Constanza MoralesBetter than just reading. And more fun.You’ll spend two to three times as much time practicing as reading. It’s how you wind up satisfied, confident, and proud, instead of confused, discouraged, and defeated. And since many people find doing things more enjoyable than reading things, it can be a pleasure to learn this way, quite apart from the impressive results you achieve.”Very effective and fun.” —Amazon reviewer A. BergaminiWritten especially for beginners.I wrote the book and exercises especially for people who are new to programming. Making no assumptions about what you already know, I walk you through JavaScript slowly, patiently. I explain every little thing in sixth-grade English. I avoid unnecessary technical jargon like the plague. (Face it, fellow authors, it is the plague.)”The layman syntax he uses…makes it much easier to suddenly realize a concept that seemed abstract and too hard to wrap your head around is suddenly not complicated at all.” — Amazon reviewer IMHOThe exercises keep you focused, give you extra practice where you’re shaky, and prepare you for each next step. Every lesson is built on top of a solid foundation that you and I have carefully constructed. Each individual step is small. But, as Amazon reviewer James Toban says, when you get to the end of the book, you’ve built “a tower of JavaScript.”If you’re an accomplished programmer already, my book may be too elementary for you. (Do you really need to be told what a variable is?) But if you’re new to programming, more than a thousand five-star reviews are pretty good evidence that my book may be just the one to get you coding JavaScript successfully.”Mark Myers’ method of getting what can be…difficult information into a format that makes it exponentially easier to consume, truly understand, and synthesize into real-world application is beyond anything I’ve encountered before.” —Amazon reviewer Jason A. Ruby

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐I have previously reviewed Mark’s HTML/CSS book which I had to learn in tandem while learning JavaScript in this book. I am very enthusiastic about learning coding this way, as an older person who has an in-born love for computer programming but is intimidated by the thought of having to try to remember things I’ve learned (not nearly as easy to do as when I was young).Since I have now gotten used to the general concepts of coding that cross platforms (I have now learned some PHP at free sites online, also with a PHP/MySQL book purchased from Amazon, and am now also working my way through Mark’s Python book), I realize even more how helpful teaching like this is for either beginners or someone like me who learned some programming languages long ago but needed a reboot having forgotten much of what I’d originally learned. Mark uses the same type of starting examples across his different books, they are simple to understand and he starts out very easy, plainly laid out so that you are able to grasp the underlying mechanisms at play.One thing to note is he doesn’t get into any detail about regular expressions. In the chapter that touches on it, he openly expresses that. As I’m here to learn how to fluently code with confidence, at first I was a little concerned about this, but there are places I can find online to go into further depth on this subject, which sounds a little confusing. As this book is quite long and in depth aside from that, I’m not sure how much more getting deeper into RegEx would’ve extended this book. So, when you consider that getting this book in Kindle, e-reader format is so very inexpensive (you just download the Amazon reader app to your computer and start working on it through there, the links at the end of the chapters will open your browser to practice what you just learned), a person can easily afford other teaching materials to go into more depth on that subject if you so desired.Having looked at some other reviews of the chapter practice sessions, I feel the need to state that I’ve never had an issue with any of the peculiarities of learning code this way. The author has to structure the practices with precise number of spaces in certain areas, etc., as this is an automated system, not an AI system, of checking what you entered to see if it’s a workable way of completing the required task, so the rigidness of the practice is necessary. It’s the short chapters and immediate, multiple question practice that is the overwhelming strength of this book. I can’t really imagine a different way now that I’ve tried this way.Originally I had tried taking lots of notes (to help my old memory) and then doing the practice at the end of each chapter. I realized at one point about halfway through this book that I had to go through the HTML/CSS book in order to be able to work with JavaScript for webpages. Once I finished that book, I went back through the first JavaScript chapters again rapid-fire, because I’d already lost some confidence in my memory of what I’d already learned with JavaScript (kids out there, getting old sucks that way!). That way of going through the book works really well, I found (that’s how I am now going through Mark’s Python book). I also discovered that I did in fact retain more than I believed I did, this way of learning truly works!

⭐This training technology (it’s much more than a book) probably was targeted at web developers and it’s great for them but it has far wider applicability.Beginners: Kids, I am your grandfather, a card carrying Mensan, and have been in information technology since before your parents were born, *stop reading* come back when you’ve completed the ‘A Smarter Way to Learn JavaScript” that I gave you.Senior Citizens: Stop wasting time with “brain training”. Learn something useful while training AND acquire a new opportunity for self expression. You’ll have fun, improve reading comprehension, memory, reasoning, typing accuracy and speed. For some parts you’ll need a little HTML. Someone should write a one page HTML cheat sheet specific to the course.Lynda.com: Immediately purchase Mark for an obscene amount of money and we can all say we knew him when.The rest of you: Mark Myers has done something great here. He has applied some sound psychological principles to teach practical JavaScript programming.Why do you care? Add “these few precepts in thy memory”: JavaScript started off as Brendan Eich’s simple, quick effort to provide web site scripting. It is now a monster probably accounting for more lines of code than any other language and is best described by David Flanagan’s 1078 pages of “JavaScript: The Definitive Guide”. You probably aren’t going to go cover-to-cover with that tome but, if you’re serious, you should own a copy. JavaScript has been taken over by a standards body and is called ECMAScript 5 with ECMAScript 6 soon to be released. People are cross compiling other languages into JavaScript. Browsers run it so efficiently that first person shooters have been written in JavaScript. “It’s alive!” AND evolving.Of course Mark doesn’t teach the whole thing. It probably wouldn’t even be advisable – see Douglas Crockford’s, “JavaScript: The Good Parts”, the other book you really should own to get into JavaScript.No, Mark restricted himself to more what Brendan’s bosses probably had in mind when they tasked him with coming up with a web scripting language. It’s not all you need but it’s a real good start. This is not a text to read. It is not a reference.A Smarter Way to Learn JavaScript is a training system for a useable subset of JavaScript. It consists of 89, two to three page Chapters. Carefully read the Chapter – there *will* be a quiz. Each topic chapter is matched with 20 exercises on the web site. The exercises are where you’ll spend the most time. They create a graduated involvement in producing code starting with filling in blanks with key words and ending up with writing and running actual code snippets. They seduce you with a rapid start and positive reinforcement. This is experiential learning by guided doing and will require effort on your part to carefully read the exercise, to understand the point the author is making and then verify your comprehension by completing the exercise task – usually a line or two of code . There is new info in the exercises; they do not merely cover what’s in the text. The format of the exercises is varied which serves to keep your interest up and the positive feedback makes them like eating potato chips – hard to stop with just one. Don’t try, do. Encouraging words and a green background added to your answer become rewards you’ll seek. If you’re wrong, learn from it. It may stick with you longer and you’ll get a chance to redeem yourself as you complete the exercises. I worked every one of them – some are real puzzlers requiring brain power beyond rote memory. Keep the big picture in mind and go for simple solutions.

⭐I have tried several online tutorials and books and nothing comes as close to explaining JavaScript so well as this books does. The exercises that you will do will infuriate you at times as they are so pendantic in wanting the code wrote to “good practice” but to be honest it’s good to start out this way, rather than pick up bad habits from the beginning. This book is A+, its definitely a bargain and I would recommend this book over any online course or YouTube tutorial on JavaScript..Edit. After completing this book I still stand by my original review that this is a very good method for learning Javascript but there are some fundamental flaws in the book and exercises. The first being the way the questions are worded. They need to broke down into various steps sometimes rather than one big paragraph. As a beginner coder, sometimes the concepts within coding(such as for loops and if else statements) are not second nature to me, so the questions needed to be worded better or broken down into steps that makes it more explicit what is required.Also another flaw is that sometimes I wrote the code in the question right but wasn’t marked as correct due to me not indenting my code as required. So back I would go an write it with indents and still it wouldn’t mark me as correct. I would then copy and paste the authors answer into the coding box and click the submit just to find yet again that it wouldn’t mark me as correct. In the end I gave up and moved on even though my answers were sometimes correct.

⭐”We are thirsting for wisdom but drowning in information” TONY ROBBINS.I have been trying to learn to code for roughly 2 years with mixed results: I have bought the books, went to workshops and done the online courses but I felt that I wasn’t really getting far. The problem wasn’t the knowledge but it was keeping the knowledge in my brain. CODING IS HARD – don’t let any of the “Learn JavaScript in 2 days” nonsense fool you!Still searching for help, but I found this book and it was brilliant and deceptively simple…1) Read the exercises for 5 – 10 minutes2) Do the online exercises via his website “asmarterwaytocode.com” 10 – 15 minutes3) Take a break then repeatI have been using it a week now and I feel that I have retained more information when I have coded than just reading or doing on line quizzes! I feel really confident that I CAN become a coder and it’s due to this book!One tip of advise: when you learn and practise the concepts via his website, try to apply them to your OWN projects. It will help make it stick out even more! A really great job and cheers to the author!

⭐I’m trying to learn code through freecodecamp and I got to the javascript section and didn’t retain anything so I bought this book on a recommedation from another freecodecamper and I have to say it’s really good, like freecodecamp it’s web based interactive exercises and the author really does know his subject.It can be a little frustrating that when you get a question “right” and it’s still marked wrong because of say indents in the code it seems a bit mean spirited but the author is trying to instill in the student the proper way to write code so it’s readable by you later.So far I’m learning things with the book that I could or didn’t with freecodecamp, so if you’re looking for a book to teach you javascript (JS) then give this a go you won’t regret it.

⭐This book did not work for me at all, the author has a confusing use of language and a very pedantic formatting regime that is incredibly frustrating. A space in the wrong place and your exercise is marked incorrect.Here is an example of the pedantic and confusing style “An if statement always begins with IF. The space that separates it from the parenthesis is new to you. I’ve taught you to code alerts and prompts with the opening parenthesis running up against the keyword, now I’m asking you not to do that in an IF statement, it’s purely a matter of style….”A good example of the pedantic nonsense that runs through this book, the code is not dependent on any such style, but it is style that seems to be the most important aspect of this book.I suggest the W3schools.com course, it’s free from cost and free from pedantic nonsense.

⭐I gotta say I’m happy that chose this book to get grasp on fundamentals of JavaScript. The author really considered beginner’s mind when he was writing this book. The book doesn’t feel cheap in the hand and I’d say the book is worth way more it what it’s being sold. Plus I really appreciated things you wouldn’t expect in a programming book like line: “If this seems nuts to you ….” and it was spot on. Made me laugh. The book isn’t overly technical yet concepts are very well explained which makes the book a perfect choice for newcomers into programming.

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