Changes in the Seventh Edition of JavaScript: The Definitive Guide

03 May 2020

The seventh edition of my book, JavaScript: The Definitive Guide is scheduled for release less than a month from today. If you own the sixth edition, it is very much time for an upgrade. This post explains what has changed in this new edition.

  • Most importantly, this edition is up-to-date and covers the very newest ES2020 features like ?. and ??. The sixth edition covered ES5, which means that I have added documentation of all the language features of ES6, ES2016, ES2017, ES2018, ES2019 and ES2020 for this update.

  • The first thing you’ll notice when you see the new edition is that O’Reilly has changed the cover. The old cover style still seems iconic to me, but this new style does seem like a nice modernization of the O’Reilly brand.

  • The second thing you’ll notice when you pick the book up is that it is significantly thinner. The 6th edition was a 1096 page brick; the 7th edition is about 400 pages slimmer: still a substantial book, but not absurdly so. The main reason for this reduced page count is that I’ve removed the reference section. In 2020 it is faster to look reference information up on MDN than it is to flip through a printed book. It simply doesn’t make sense to include that material in this new edition.

  • The cover of the 6th edition includes the tagline Activate Your Web Pages. I don’t remember when that was added, but it feels very dated (like, “DHTML”-level dated) to me. For the 7th edition I asked O’Reilly to change this to Master the World’s Most-Used Programming Language and the new cover positions this as a subtitle. (The “most-used” claim is from the 2019 Stack Overflow developer survey which found “For the seventh year in a row, JavaScript is the most commonly used programming language”.)

  • “Master the world’s most-used programming language” isn’t just marketing copy for the cover, though. It reflects a real change in focus for the book. The web platform has become way too large to be documented definitively by any one book. And, with the rise of Node, JavaScript isn’t just the language of web browsers anymore. So starting with this seventh edition I will be documenting the JavaScript language definitively, and providing an in-depth (but not definitive) introduction to the use of that language with Web APIs and Node APIs.

    The 6th edition devoted about 290 pages to the language itself, 410 pages to the Web platform, and a meager 10 pages to Node. The 7th edition has 400 pages on the language, 160 pages on the Web, 60 pages on Node, and 30 pages on the JavaScript ecosystem of tools and language extensions. The cuts to the web documentation are not as deep as they seem, however. Much of the reduction in page count was achieved by removing material that is no longer relevant in 2020, such as coverage of document.write(), attachEvent(), and pretty much all mentions of Internet Explorer. There was a lot of material on CSS that I’ve removed, and the entire chapter on jQuery is gone (it is still available as a pocket reference though).

  • The 7th edition has a number of rewritten and new chapters:

    • Chapter 6, Objects, and Chapter 8, Functions, are not completely rewritten but they include a lot of new material covering all the ES6 extensions to object literal syntax, arrow functions, parameter defaults, rest parameters, the spread operator, and so on.

    • Chapter 9, Classes, is entirely rewritten. The chapter begins the old fashioned way: it demonstrates how to create a JavaScript class by directly defining methods on the prototype object. I believe that it is still important to understand how classes actually work in JavaScript. But after some initial examples of this technique, the chapter switches to using the modern class keyword.

    • Chapter 10, Modules, is new. When I wrote the 6th edition, JavaScript had no module system and my discussion of using immediately-invoked function expressions as modules was simply tacked on to the end of the classes chapters. This new chapter documents both the module system used by Node and the ES6-standard modules that are now (finally!) supported by all browsers.

    • Chapter 11, The JavaScript Standard Library, is a new chapter that covers maps, sets, typed arrays, dates, errors, JSON, and internationalization. The existing chapter on regular expressions from the 6th edition has been updated and turned into a (long) section of this chapter. This chapter also covers three APIs that are not formally part of the JavaScript language, but that are implemented by browsers and by Node: the console API, the URL class, and the setTimeout() and setInterval() functions.

    • Chapter 12, Iterators and Generators is new, and documents exactly what the title says. This chapter teaches you how to use Symbol.iterator to make your own classes iterable so that they work with the for/of loop. And it also explains generator (defined with function*) and the yield and yield* keywords.

    • Chapter 13, Asynchronous JavaScript is a detailed discussion of asynchronous APIs and explains how to use events, callbacks, Promises, and async and await. Promises are a revolutionary addition to JavaScript, but using them correctly can be hard unless you understand them thoroughly. This chapter goes deep in an attempt to definitively explain Promises.

    • Chapter 14, Metaprogramming is a grab-bag of advanced language features that may be of primary interest to those writing libraries for use by other programmers. It explains property descriptors, object extensibility, template tag functions, proxy objects, the Reflect API and well-known symbols.

    • Chapter 15, JavaScript in Web Browsers is by far the longest chapter in the book, introducing the Web platform in 160 pages. It includes the content from the 6th edition that is still relevant, plus new material covering web components, fetch(), history.pushState() and more. This chapter concludes with an extended example that implements a multi-threaded Mandelbrot set viewer app. The example demonstrates web workers (and includes a Promise-based WorkerPool utility class), inter-thread communication with postMessage(), the transfer (without copying) of array buffers between threads, history management with pushState() and popstate(), keyboard and pointer events, scripted CSS transforms, the URL() class, and generators.

    • Chapter 16, Server-Side JavaScript with Node, is a detailed introduction to Node that starts with the fundamentals: events, buffers, and streams. This is followed by practical sections on working with files, making HTTP requests, serving HTTP responses, and concurrent programming with threads and child processes.

    • Chapter 17, JavaScript Tools and Extensions, concludes the book with an introduction to some important parts of the JavaScript ecosystem: eslint, prettier, Jest, npm, code bundlers, Babel, JSX and Flow. I couldn’t document everything, so this chapter is a curated—but not particularly opinionated—list of some of the most popular JavaScript tools and extensions. This chapter is intended not as a recommendation for particular tools and technologies, but as an exhibition of the kinds of tools that professional JavaScript programmers regularly use.

It is a really good book! You can order it here.