Free Javascript books for experienced developers
Because free knowledge is the best knowledge
There are a wealth of materials available online or to download to guide a professional through the different levels and aspects of JavaScript. Here are a few books which can be very useful in providing quick tips and pointers. They are designed to engage mostly advanced programmers.
1 You Don't Know Javascript by Kyle Simpson
This is not actually a single book but a series.
“Typecasting using the bitwise unsigned right shift operator converts a double into an unsigned 32-bit integer, deoptimizing the V8 engine”.
If you did not get what that previous sentence said, you should not read “You Don’t Know JavaScript” series yet.
You Don't Know JS is a brilliant book series highly recommended for deeply understanding JavaScript. However, the book is for advanced programmers who get the language but want to know the quirks, simply because there aren't many exercises, and it explores the language in depth right out of the gate. In order to really appreciate what the book is doing, I think you need to have some prior experience working with JavaScript.
These six books read in the proper order will make you understand almost everything about JS.
2 Learning JavaScript Design Patterns by Addy Osmani
Learning JavaScript design Patterns is a very short but dense book available for free online and also downloadable for a minimal charge, which discusses design patterns in JavaScript. The book begins with an introduction to design patterns, discussing their importance and optimum ways of implementing them. The main target audience for this book is professional web developers who want to improve their knowledge of design patterns and how they can effectively implement them with JavaScript.
Addy does a great job of introducing a variety of design patterns and provides nice examples for each.
3 Practical Modern JavaScript by Nicolás Bevacqua
Not only it's a good textbook, it also serves as a reference book. I've looked up code snippets in the book for a couple of times after I finished reading. Besides explaining how and when to use the new ES6 features, it also provides a look at how these features are implemented at high level.
It introduces ES6 (and beyond) language features in a friendly, approachable way. The treatment is neither too deep, nor too shallow; the author has found an ideal middle ground. Especially nice was the fact that no language features were skewed or treated unfairly, or incompletely in service to idiosyncratic opinions the author may have.
This title especially stands out for its treatment of in-progress features like class instance fields, decorators (yes, the updated stage 2 version), and async iterators.
While the book felt hastily edited at times, overall it's clear the author knows his topic extremely well. I highly recommend this book for both novice, and experienced JavaScript developers alike
4 Eloquent JavaScript by Marijn Haverbake
Eloquent JavaScript is available online for free or in paperback form.This book provides a good introduction to JavaScript and the basic programming concepts needed in order to master the language. This book starts from values, types and operators used and takes readers through the program structure, basic and advanced functions which are available in JavaScript. It also gives an introduction about how JavaScript works in tandem with other design languages such as HTML, CSS.
5 Building Front-End Web Apps with Plain JavaScript by Gerd Wagner
This book by Gerd Wagner is a complete tutorial on how to develop a front end web application by only using JavaScript without using any third party framework or library. This book has been designed for JavaScript programmers and also software developers who have experience in OOPS based programming languages. The book provides readers with a complete code of example applications which can be run from the web server to help users with the nuances of building a front end application.