Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja

What Hacker News says

1. brailsafeOct 2026
   People here seem incredulous that others would learn from a video series, course, or book, but I've always found this content extremely valuable and would continue learning from them even now. I learned the basics of async programming through learning about AJAX from Jeremy Keith's book on the subject, I dove very deep on JS itself from Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja, Cocoa from BigNerdRanch, Much of Swift and SwiftUI from John Sundell's writing, tutsplus, HackingwithSwift, Grid and subgrid from Rachel Andrew's writing. As a largely self-taught programmer, these resources have been absolutely crucial, and in retrospect it was a mistake to conflate the ability to find any information I want in discrete chunks with actually learning parts of a subject. I've also only rarely found University level formal courses to be as substantial in terms of what's actually useful to bring with me into practice. LLMs are more sophisticated in many ways, but if I want to learn something, I need to approach it more seriously than modern tools would have me believe. LLMs are great at letting me skip over the learning part, and they're great at helping me explore the problem space, but they're not what I'd turn to for educating myself on anything I care about, in much the same way that listening to a podcast or watching a documentary does not qualify as education, nor does it replace reading and/or physically practicing something.

   Web development, as much as some would like to think, is and has always been, complex.

   I haven't tried learning Rust yet, and I'm sure as hell not going to lean on an LLM at all when I do.

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2. _the_inflatorNov 2025
   Sure!

   And there is way more to it.

   This kind of code was common and also the starting point of every modern language innovation we have today in JavaScript - even TypeScript, and maybe any modern web development on the server as well.

   Tables were the only way to create browser independent layouts dynamically. Or put another way: adding interactivity to websites. And simply because hacking is fun and browsers were experimenting with APIs accessible by JavaScript.

   CSS was still bleeding from ACID tests, Netscape was forgotten, Mozilla build Phoenix out of the ashes of the bursting bubble and called their effort Firefox.

   In Germany there was and still is the infamous selfHTML project. I remember vividly reading and testing Stefans Münz tutorials on this topic. The content is untouched, only the layout changed, so go back in time for more table fun:

   https://wiki.selfhtml.org/wiki/Beispiel:JS-Anwendung-Tabelle...

   https://wiki.selfhtml.org/wiki/JavaScript/Tutorials/Tabellen...

   It was pretty common to have large one file websites: php and html with css and javascript mixed.

   There was no git, no VisualStudio Code, Claude Sonnet - no, Notepad and later Notepad++

   (Even the DOOM guys had no version control system in the early stages.)

   For me John Resig shines out here. Epic genius behind jQuery. The source code was pure magic, and his book "Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja" is for me the all time climax in programming excellence.

   If you never utilised the prototype property, you will never understand any of the most basic structures and inner workings JavaScript has to this day and why Classes are "syntactical sugar" for functions and nothing else.

   Function.toString in combination with New Function made me enter 10 matrices in parallel at the time. What a revelation. :D

   Nicholas Zakas comes close with his seminal Web Development book, in which he featured every Browser API available at the time with examples on roughly 1000 pages. To this day, exercising most of it and understanding the DOM and Windows object was the best investment ever, because and this fact 15 years later paved the way for the success of a financial SaaS platform. Lost wisdom, not covered by any modern framework like Angular or ReacJS.

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3. regusMar 2024
   Secrets of the Javascript Ninja is my favorite JS book by far.
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4. regusMar 2021
   I consider secrets of the javascript ninja to be one of if not the best books on javascript. The section on functions and closures are a must read.
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5. LocalPCGuyApr 2020
   Not sure how it holds up, but Secrets of the Javascript Ninja was the book I read when I felt like that, and it significantly helped me understand a few concepts I had struggled with. By John Resig (created jQuery). But it's a few years old now, so likely won't cover much if any ES6+ stuff. But I'd bet the concept stuff is still very valid.

   Also the You Don't Know JS series. And Elliot's Programming Javascript Applications.

   I don't know you, so I don't know if this applies or not, but be careful not to fall into the "expert beginner" trap (i.e. Dunning Kruger). Your first sentence starts to feel that way, but the fact you're asking for more resources and aware there are things you don't know are good signs. Always keep learning, the rabbit hole goes ever deeper.

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6. raztogt21Nov 2019
   Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja by Resig. My favorite to learn the intermediate level for JS.
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