Most programming languages contain good and bad parts, but JavaScript has more than its share of the bad, having been developed and released in a hurry before it could be refined. This authoritative book scrapes away these bad features to reveal a subset of JavaScript that's more reliable, readable, and maintainable than the language as a whole--a subset you can use to create truly extensible and efficient code.

Considered the JavaScript expert by many people in the development community, author Douglas Crockford identifies the abundance of good ideas that make JavaScript an outstanding object-oriented programming language-ideas such as functions, loose typing, dynamic objects, and an expressive object literal notation. Unfortunately, these good ideas are mixed in with bad and downright awful ideas, like a programming model based on global variables.

When Java applets failed, JavaScript became the language of the Web by default, making its popularity almost completely independent of its qualities as a programming language. In JavaScript: The Good Parts, Crockford finally digs through the steaming pile of good intentions and blunders to give you a detailed look at all the genuinely elegant parts of JavaScript, including:

• Syntax
• Objects
• Functions
• Inheritance
• Arrays
• Regular expressions
• Methods
• Style
• Beautiful features

The real beauty? As you move ahead with the subset of JavaScript that this book presents, you'll also sidestep the need to unlearn all the bad parts. Of course, if you want to find out more about the bad parts and how to use them badly, simply consult any other JavaScript book.

With JavaScript: The Good Parts, you'll discover a beautiful, elegant, lightweight and highly expressive language that lets you create effective code, whether you're managing object libraries or just trying to get Ajax to run fast. If you develop sites or applications for the Web, this book is an absolute must.

While the REST design philosophy has captured the imagination of web and enterprise developers alike, using this approach to develop real web services is no picnic. This cookbook includes more than 100 recipes to help you take advantage of REST, HTTP, and the infrastructure of the Web. You'll learn ways to design RESTful web services for client and server applications that meet performance, scalability, reliability, and security goals, no matter what programming language and development framework you use.

Each recipe includes one or two problem statements, with easy-to-follow, step-by-step instructions for solving them, as well as examples using HTTP requests and responses, and XML, JSON, and Atom snippets. You'll also get implementation guidelines, and a discussion of the pros, cons, and trade-offs that come with each solution.

• Learn how to design resources to meet various application scenarios
• Successfully design representations and URIs
• Implement the hypertext constraint using links and link headers
• Understand when and how to use Atom and AtomPub
• Know what and what not to do to support caching
• Learn how to implement concurrency control
• Deal with advanced use cases involving copying, merging, transactions, batch processing, and partial updates
• Secure web services and support OAuth

If you're like most developers, you rely heavily on JavaScript to build interactive and quick-responding web applications. The problem is that all of those lines of JavaScript code can slow down your apps. This book reveals techniques and strategies to help you eliminate performance bottlenecks during development. You'll learn how to improve execution time, downloading, interaction with the DOM, page life cycle, and more.

Yahoo frontend engineer Nicholas C. Zakas and five other JavaScript experts--Ross Harmes, Julien Lecomte, Steven Levithan, Stoyan Stefanov, and Matt Sweeney--demonstrate optimal ways to load code onto a page, and offer programming tips to help your JavaScript run as efficiently and quickly as possible. You'll learn the best practices to build and deploy your files to a production environment, and tools that can help you find problems once your site goes live.

• Identify problem code and use faster alternatives to accomplish the same task
• Improve scripts by learning how JavaScript stores and accesses data
• Implement JavaScript code so that it doesn't slow down interaction with the DOM
• Use optimization techniques to improve runtime performance
• Learn ways to ensure the UI is responsive at all times
• Achieve faster client-server communication
• Use a build system to minify files, and HTTP compression to deliver them to the browser

How do you create a mission-critical site that provides exceptional performance while remaining flexible, adaptable, and reliable 24/7? Written by the manager of a UI group at Yahoo , Developing Large Web Applications offers practical steps for building rock-solid applications that remain effective even as you add features, functions, and users. You'll learn how to develop large web applications with the extreme precision required for other types of software.

• Avoid common coding and maintenance headaches as small websites add more pages, more code, and more programmers
• Get comprehensive solutions for refining HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and Ajax for large-scale web applications
• Make changes in one place that ripple through all affected page elements
• Embrace the virtues of modularity, encapsulation, abstraction, and loosely coupled components
• Use tried-and-true techniques for managing data exchange, including working with forms and cookies
• Learn often-overlooked best practices in code management and software engineering
• Prepare your code to make performance enhancements and testing easier

What do Amazon's product reviews, eBay's feedback score system, Slashdot's Karma System, and Xbox Live's Achievements have in common? They're all examples of successful reputation systems that enable consumer websites to manage and present user contributions most effectively. This book shows you how to design and develop reputation systems for your own sites or web applications, written by experts who have designed web communities for Yahoo and other prominent sites.

Building Web Reputation Systems helps you ask the hard questions about these underlying mechanisms, and why they're critical for any organization that draws from or depends on user-generated content. It's a must-have for system architects, product managers, community support staff, and UI designers.

• Scale your reputation system to handle an overwhelming inflow of user contributions
• Determine the quality of contributions, and learn why some are more useful than others
• Become familiar with different models that encourage first-class contributions
• Discover tricks of moderation and how to stamp out the worst contributions quickly and efficiently
• Engage contributors and reward them in a way that gets them to return
• Examine a case study based on actual reputation deployments at industry-leading social sites, including Yahoo , Flickr, and eBay