I think this can be an incredibly helpful book if you hit it at the right stage in your JavaScript (JS) learning process, even if you don't need to implement full-blown MVC for your immediate needs. I can honestly say that I've learned as much, and probably more, from working through the core of this book (Chapters 1-5) than I have from any other single JS book.

But, you need to be at the right stage... which is basically, when you can follow the book, although it may take a bit of effort. If you're already a ninja, you probably don't need to read the book at all, unless you simply want to be exposed to another POV. And, for a lot of non-ninja, the book will be too advanced. Luckily, O'Reilly put the entire first chapter on-line so you can judge for yourself.

Chapter 1 is no namby pampy intro. In the chapter McCaw defines a constructor function used to create constructor functions that emulate classes in languages which support classes natively. He also includes a useful discussion of how the 'this' context switches in JS and how to control it with bind or by defining a jQ-like proxy method. Later design patterns have some similarity to what he does in chapter 1 (using Object.create instead of constructors), so if you can follow this chapter, you're probably ready to take on the book.

I'd describe the audience for the book as developers who've already built an app, or at least added fairly complex functionality to web pages and are comfortable with prototypal inheritance, closures on inner functions, call/apply and who know basic DOM scripting. Additionally, you may well have a sneaking suspicion that although your apps work, they're not designed as cleanly as they could be. If you're part of that audience, you just might learn a boatload of stuff as you follow McCaw's thinking as to how to design large-scale JS apps. Despite the sub-title, you don't really need to know jQuery (jQ) all that well, as long as you're somewhat familiar with it and the way it chains methods. One of the nice things about the book is that McCaw often gives you the plain old JavaScript (PoJS) for some of the basic methods he adds to his template objects and constructors, before switching to jQ for convenience. For example, after chapter 1 you'll have the PoJS equivalents for jQ's extend and proxy so it's easy to create a PoJS version for say the Model object or the Controller object which he defines later. For other jQ methods used in examples, you should be at the level where you can figure out what jQ is doing and write the equivalent in PoJS if that's what you want to do.

Some of the other reviews have touched on a few negatives, but to my mind they're not enough to downgrade the book. Occasionaly, the discussion seems to jump over an explanatory detail, but if you make a lab page that links to the book errata page and download the code for the examples, you should be able to fill in any gaps. I found the first five chapters fascinating, and chapters 6-13 useful and concise roll ups on various topics like dependency management, debugging and various libraries. In addition there are appendices that do a quick survey of jQuery and CSS3.

The problem with learning JS in the contemporary landscape is that what used to be advanced, even esoteric, technique is commonplace now. If you go back and look at the Sitepoint JavaScript Anthology or PPK on JavaScript which came out ~2005/2006, you'll see relatively straightforward and easy to understand JS and DOM scripting. But, as Crockford noted "JavaScript is Lisp in C's clothing" and if you don't have a theoretical background in functional programming, it can be very challenging to follow the ninja use of function scope to create modules, encapsulate values in closures etc... Wrapping your head around the core of this book can really deepen your understanding of JS.

This is not a book for fresh, new beginning coders. That said, this is the perfect book for anyone who has experience coding and you want to get into JS, or anyone who has been in JS and want to kick things up. I've been a php/AS3 coder for 5+ years and have started doing things with backbone.js for work. The first few chapters of this book are just packed with great info on JavaScript and MVC in JS. In fact, the first chapter jumps right in with MVC and Classes in JS. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

quick read with good examples

Alex (the author) wrote Spine and is an accomplished JavaScript expert. This book is for his peers, not for web developers looking for design patterns to help tame the client-side tangle. If this desciption is already beginning to sound familiar, focus your efforts on consuming a library like Spine or KnockoutJS and save your hard earned dollars for books that provide applied guidance.

In the preface, Alex indicates that the key prequisite for getting benefit from this book is modest JavaScript experience up to and including JQuery. I've been using JQuery for years and have an intermediate understanding of core JavaScript. I am not a JavaScript expert, I'm a JavaScript application developer. If your experience is similar to mine, you may want to go elsewhere for advancing your skills. I respectfully submit that you must be a JavaScript expert to benefit from this book.

On the other hand, if you are a JavaScript expert and you would like to design and build your own MVC JavaScript library, this book is for you.

IMHO, this book is for 1 in 100 developers - the elite who work for Yahoo or similar software vendor.

I'm humbled by programmers like Alex and truly appreciate their efforts. Sincere apologies and best wishes to Mr. MacCaw.

This book is immensely practical while still teaching concepts. It is far clearer than, "JavaScript: The Good Parts", which you can skip entirely if you read this book. The author looks at how to use JavaScript in the large, not just showing snippets in isolation. The only deductions I would make are for the author's promotion of his own library, Spine.js, which, even with this book, is poorly documented.

A good book on JavaScript with nice examples. Good introduction to MVC approach in JavaScript, HTML5 and much more. Alex MacCaw is the author of spine.js library which is also presented in the book.

Don't expect this book to teach you anything about how to use JavaScript to buld Web Applications. The author states at the outset that the book assumes most Javascript authors only know how to copy/paste existing JavaScript code into their applications and promises to teach you how to use JavaScript to build MVC-based Web Applications. Unfortunately, by page six, the book already assumes you are a JavaScript Master and uses code and functions that have not been defined by the author and that do not even exist in any of the ECMA standards.

If you *already* know everything this book covers, it should be a great review.

Great idea for a book and much of the content is first class. Make sure you've read JavaScript the Good Parts and/or JavaScript Patterns and have learned the basics of JQuery before even attempting to read this book though, otherwise your going to have trouble following along with some of the content.

Unfortunately it does have some falws. In particular I found some of the descriptions of code samples were lacking, additionally many of the code samples seemed un-necessarily terse/confusing. Normally I wouldn't massively care about this sort of thing in code samples, however when coupled with the use of some of JavaScripts odder features they make the code a bit painful to read. Thats not to say you can't understand whats going on, you just have to put in more effort than you might expect and you probably won't find it as enjoyable as you'd like.

These issues are the main reason I've given the book just three stars. I'm hoping the issues will be addressed in any future second edition, at which time this will definitely be a five star book.

One other thing, chapter 11 is on Spine.js. This chapter is now a little out-of-date, for example Spine now uses CoffeeScripts classes, so you may want to use the excellent online documentation for spine.js instead.

Offensichtlich hat dieses Buch jemand geschrieben, der sein Handwerk versteht, sehr viel Erfahrung hat und oft genug darüber reflektiert hat, wie man es gut oder noch besser machen kann.

Auf einzelne Inhalte einzugehen, würde den Rahmen deutlich sprengen. Jedenfalls bekommt man gut leserlich und verständlich einen Überblick über sehr viele Aspekte der Erstellung von Web-Applikationen, die sich hauptsächlich am Client abspielen. Für Leute, die bisher typische Webanwendungen mit PHP oder Java programmiert haben, steckt jede Menge interessanter Informationen in diesem Buch. Aber auch "alte JavaScript-Hasen" werden sich bestimmt nicht langweilen, besonders wenn sie noch keine weitreichende Erfahrung mit "echten" JavaScript Applikationen haben.

In einem Untertitel heißt es zwar: "jQuery Developers' Guide to Moving State to the Client". Ich würde das Buch aber auch den (wenigen) Leuten empfehlen, die jQuery gar nicht einsetzen. Themen wie Model-Classes, Observer-Pattern, Controller, Dependency Management, WebSockets, Testing/Debugging und Deploying sind für Nicht-jQuery-Programmierer genauso nützlich.

Had the code I wanted to log events on a mobile phone for UNITE ™ found on GitHub.

I came form AS3 background and I couldn't make my head around the mess that pure JS is. This book was really helpful for someone like me who has experience with more structured language and want to learn the real life practices of adding a structure to JS code.

Nice book don't have time for more elaborate review. Others have pointed out pros and cons of this book already. Nice nice

I read most of this book on my phone's kindle app, so I kinda skipped the code samples since they didn't layout very well on the small screen. However, I got the main themes that were covered as I went along. These were really just building up to the author introducing his own Javascript MVC framework (Spine) which features all the previously discussed concepts. If you really want to use all these ideas in your work, then the chances are that you're going to want to use Spine OR Backbone.js (a similar framework which has been around a bit longer and was the inspiration for Spine).

Before reading this book, I wasn't aware of the existence or function of these MVC Javascript frameworks. Now I've started experimenting with Backbone.js and it seems like these frameworks are the future of large Javascript apps.

So this book has been a great introduction to a new way of writing Javascript apps. However, this field is moving very fast, so various things get out of date: Spine has evolved to use CoffeeScript (not mentioned in this book atall) and the templating library mentioned earlier in the book has also been discontinued.