Speaking JavaScript

This book is a guide to learning the JavaScript language by Axel Rauschmayer. The simplified Chinese edition is published by Posts & Telecom Press under license from O'Reilly Media, translated by Wang Yulin, Du Huan, Zhuang Tingting, and Zhang Zipeng. The book is about 516,000 Chinese characters and 413 pages. The book is divided into four parts. Part 1, "JavaScript Quick Start," uses one chapter to walk readers through the basics of programming: syntax, variables and assignment, primitive values and objects, booleans and truthiness, numbers, operators, strings, conditional and loop statements, functions (including hoisting, arguments, parameters, and optional parameters), exception handling, and more. Part 2, "Background," starts from outside the language: why choose JavaScript, how JavaScript was created, the ECMAScript standardization process, and important milestones in the language's history, helping readers understand why the language looks the way it does today. Part 3, "Deep Dive into JavaScript," is the main body of the book, unfolding concept by concept: syntax, values, operators, booleans, numbers, strings, statements, exception handling, functions, variable scope/environments and closures, objects and inheritance, arrays, regular expressions, Date, Math, JSON, standard global variables, character encoding, and the new features introduced by ECMAScript 5. Part 4, "Tips, Tools, and Libraries," turns to engineering practice: a metaprogramming style guide, debugging-related language mechanisms, subclassing built-in constructors, generating API documentation with JSDoc, common libraries, module systems and package managers, and other tools, with a final chapter offering a roadmap for further study. The book is structured for both reference and sequential reading, with dense code examples, and is suited to developers who want to move JavaScript from "can use it" to "understand how it works."