UserScripts in 20 Minutes (Coffee Book Series)

A superb guide. The examples are small but complete.

There is a particular kind of technical book that is dense without being difficult, and this is one of them. The chapters on javascript are the strongest — the examples are stripped down but complete, and I could follow along without constant guessing. The author clearly knows the subject deeply and has thought hard about how to teach it. The explanations are careful without being condescending, which is a difficult balance to strike. An easy five stars from me. I look forward to whatever the author writes next.

A genuinely enjoyable read that also taught me a great deal.

A colleague recommended this and I can see why. It does something that few technical books manage: it respects the reader's time. The balance between theory and practice is well judged; neither side dominates. The index and cross-references are surprisingly good, which matters for a book I will come back to. The author is unusually honest about where the simplifications break down, which I appreciated. This is the book I wish had existed when I started working with javascript.

Strong content, uneven pacing. I would still recommend it.

I have been working with javascript for a few years now and I still found plenty here that was new to me. The code samples assume a particular environment, which took a bit of fiddling to get running properly. There is a section near the end that ties several earlier ideas together in a way I had not seen before. Worth picking up if you already have the basics. Set realistic expectations and you will get a lot out of it.