Monthly Reads: November 2016

This post opens the “Monthly Reads” series, which is going to be a summary of the most interesting technical articles, tutorials, websites and books I’ve read during the past month, with my comments on them. I hope you’ll find something for you.

Mastering JavaScript Object-Oriented Programming (book by Andrea Chiarelli)

Very important book about OO JavaScript. No page is wasted on repeating basic principles of the language. Once and for all, I learned how to implement constructors (both in ES5 and ES2015) and inheritance. The 6 OOP principles and SOLID rules are explained very well with the necessary examples. The author goes even beyond “pure” OOP topics and adds chapters about design patterns, asynchronous coding using newest JS features and modules. All this makes the book feel very complete. I made a lot of highlights and am going to come back often. Without exaggeration, this book “levelled up” my JavaScript skills.

CSS Inheritance, The Cascade And Global Scope: Your New Old Worst Best Friends (article by Heydon Pickering)

An alternative, pretty systematic approach to writing CSS. Good refresher on important language features - inheritance and cascade - especially for heavy users of frameworks like Bootstrap. I think the core rules presented here are universal and helpful regardless of your project’s CSS architecture (designing for consistency, removing redundancy, keeping low specifity of selectors). After reading, Atomic CSS remained scary to me and BEM became a bit less atractive.

True Lies Of Optimistic User Interfaces (article by Denys Mishunov)

The written definition of what I was thinking about visual feedback on the web. Takeaway: where possible, don’t make users wait for server response - fake it for extra smooth experience.

I totally forgot about print style sheets (article by Manuel Matuzovic)

A great reminder to sort out my print CSS. People do put websites on paper - make it easy for them.