Smarter Way to Learn JavaScript The New Approach That Uses Technology to Cut Your Effort in Half

Written for beginners, useful for experienced developers who want to sharpen their skills and don't mind covering some ground they already know. (Feel free to skip early chapters that cover elementary topics like alerts, variables, and strings). Step-by-step, you learn the fundamentals of JavaScript as well as some advanced concepts including constructors and prototypes.

The book is extremely user-friendly. It assumes no programming experience. Chapters cover only as much as the average learner can absorb in ten minutes, so you're never asked to eat an elephant. Explanations are in plain, nontechnical English that people of all backgrounds can readily understand. With ample coding examples and illustrations.

The most important part: free, online, interactive exercises paired with each chapter. Cognitive research shows that retention increases 400 percent when learners are challenged to retrieve the information they just read. You'll spend two to three times as long practicing as reading. When you code incorrectly, you'll get as many do-overs as you need, until you know it cold.

Testing showed that books and courses load up the reader with far too much information at a time. So I divide up the information into little chunks that won't overwhelm you.

A book on coding doesn't have to be written in impenetrable legalese. It can actually be human-readable. My book is.

People often learn best through examples, so I provide plenty of them.

Most important, before you have a chance to forget what you've read in the book, I ask you to fire up your desktop or laptop (not your mobile device) and head over to my website, where you run a set of interactive exercises, practicing everything you've learned-until you're sure you've mastered it.

Readers tell me they often start the exercises thinking they've learned the latest lesson, and quickly find out they're still a little shaky on it. The automated exercise manager protects you against this common learner delusion. It keeps you at it until your overconfidence becomes real confidence-confidence that's based on your excellent performance. There are 1,750 exercises in all. They're all interactive, with an automated answer-checker that corrects your missteps and points you in the right direction when you stumble. And they're all free.

Thousands of readers have filled out feedback forms telling me that the combination of the book and interactive exercises is involving, fun, frustration-free, addictive, confidence-building, and...well, read the reviews.

The first problem is retention. You remember only ten or twenty percent of what you read. That spells failure. To become fluent in a computer language, you have to retain pretty much everything.

How can you retain everything? Only by constantly being asked to play everything back. That's why people use flashcards. But my system does flashcards one better. After reading a short chapter, you go to my website and complete twenty interactive exercises. Algorithms check your work to make sure you know what you think you know. When you stumble, you do the exercise again. You keep trying until you know the chapter cold. The exercises are free.

The second problem is comprehension. Many learners hit a wall when they try to understand advanced concepts like variable scope and prototypes. Unfortunately, they blame themselves. That's why the Dummies books sell so well. But the fault lies with the authors, coding virtuosos who lack teaching talent. I'm the opposite of the typical software book author. I'll never code fast enough to land a job at Google. But I can teach.

Anyway, most comprehension problems are just retention problems in disguise. If you get lost trying to understand variable scope, it's because you don't remember how functions work. Thanks to the interactive exercises on my website, you'll always understand and remember everything necessary to confidently tackle the next concept.

"I've signed up to a few sites like Udemy, Codecademy, FreeCodeCamp, Lynda, YouTube videos, even searched on Coursera but nothing seemed to work for me. This book takes only 10 minutes each chapter and after that, you can exercise what you've just learned right away " -Amazon reviewer Constanza Morales

Better than just reading. And more fun.

You'll spend two to three times as much time practicing as reading. It's how you wind up satisfied, confident, and proud, instead of confused, discouraged, and defeated. And since many people find doing things more enjoyable than reading things, it can be a pleasure to learn this way, quite apart from the impressive results you achieve.

"Very effective and fun." -Amazon reviewer A. Bergamini

Written especially for beginners.

I wrote the book and exercises especially for people who are new to programming. Making no assumptions about what you already know, I walk you through JavaScript slowly, patiently. I explain every little thing in sixth-grade English. I avoid unnecessary technical jargon like the plague. (Face it, fellow authors, it is the plague.)

"The layman syntax he uses...makes it much easier to suddenly realize a concept that seemed abstract and too hard to wrap your head around is suddenly not complicated at all." - Amazon reviewer IMHO

The exercises keep you focused, give you extra practice where you're shaky, and prepare you for each next step. Every lesson is built on top of a solid foundation that you and I have carefully constructed. Each individual step is small. But, as Amazon reviewer James Toban says, when you get to the end of the book, you've built "a tower of JavaScript."

If you're an accomplished programmer already, my book may be too elementary for you. (Do you really need to be told what a variable is?) But if you're new to programming, more than a thousand five-star reviews are pretty good evidence that my book may be just the one to get you coding JavaScript successfully.

"Mark Myers' method of getting what can be...difficult information into a format that makes it exponentially easier to consume, truly understand, and synthesize into real-world application is beyond anything I've encountered before." -Amazon reviewer Jason A. Ruby