madbernard | Opinionated textbooks, I desire you (Reply)

I was just reading my friend Anneke's blog from before she did Hack Reactor. In this post she says

"I’m wrapping my head around Javascript’s call() and apply() methods. These get used a lot, and it’s important to understand just how they work. More immediately, these get used in the Hack Reactor pre-course work that I’m working my way through ..."

That crystallized an opinion in me: I want my learning materials to have opinions, because opinions are context.

Eloquent Javascript presents as a textbook, ie "neutral", but since Marijn Haverbeke is a guy with strong opinions they sometimes leak through and make the book way more valuable to me. Codecademy, on the other hand, just presents one thing after another. Last year I asked Ben-the-housemate to help troubleshooting a switch statement project there, and he had to look up the syntax, despite coding JavaScript every day. He explained that switch statements are almost never used. That kind of thing is gold! I'm happy to learn about switch statements, but knowing what the actual bread and butter of a language is is far more helpful. Anneke passed me the Functional Programming in JavaScript page, where Jafar Husain says,

"[map, filter, concatAll, reduce, & zip] will probably be the most powerful, flexible, and useful functions you'll ever learn."

That's what I'm talking about! I'd love to know enough to be able to debate about what is best in JavaScript. Wrangling in forums (well moderated forums that don't allow personal attacks), or watching such wrangles, is the best way to see all sides of a thing.