I like to keep up to date on my craft, and it amazes me how many books there are on programming. Why just on the topic of Javascript alone O'Reilly publishing has 944 books listed when you search for javascript. Really! 944 books!!
I personally have 33 of those books in digital (PDF) format, and have read 6 of them. So far I can say, I have learned pretty much nothing more then I already knew before I read them. To be fair I have learned a few things, but nothing earth shattering. I know the amount of time I have spent on those books is quite large, and my wife can vouch for the time I didn't spend with her since I was "Learning" again.
Most of the content in those books looked like a copy and paste exercise from someone else's work. And don't get me started on the "code" samples. I think if I see the variable names Foo and Bar one more time I am either going to throw-up, or poke my own eye's out! It's almost as bad as the Northwind database examples... no it IS worse.
Seems the norm now is if you can't get or keep a programming job you start writing books. Or worse yet create your own "Framework" or "Library" and pass it off as something "New". AND worse yet is how many programmers are following these people right off the cliff.
I know we want to create great web sites, and in a timely fashion, but let's do our homework people! No matter how much it hurts to read these tomes, we still need to do it. How else are we going to know if it's crap, fact or fiction.
The point of this article is to point out how a simple programming language like JavaScript can be blown out of proportion, and made into something so complicated. If you really just take it at face value, use it as it was meant to be used, it is a great language. And how many books do your really need to get that across to others. Maybe starting with the ECMA-262 language specification would be a good starting point. I would love to know how many people have even looked at that??
Well time to get off my soapbox for today.
Have fun programming, and Keep It Simple, Stupid.