Reading-list

This is a small effort to list down the resources that I liked while learning a specific technology.

I like going through authorative/bible-style documentation and books while learning. Finding that gem takes a bit of time, but I often lose track of those perfect books/links when I want to go through them again or suggest to my friends.

In short, this is a highly opinionated list of resources that I would be happy to pay for any day.

HTML & CSS

1. HTML and CSS: Design and Build Websites ****

   This is a beautiful visual book (with a generic title) and great for anyone to get started. If you feel that html is dull, this should change that. It is indispensable for beginners, worth a skim for intermediates and experts.

   It is not a reference book, hence weak on the details.

2. HTML & CSS: The Complete Reference, Fifth Edition **

   In my opinion, you don't really need to deep dive into html - mostly because all the magic is really in CSS. But if you still want to, this can be your reference book on HTML (ignore css section of the book).

   Beware - it is a pretty outdated book, filled with older way of doing things - so you need to know what you are looking for.

3. Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide by Eric Meyer *****

   This is the most awesome book on CSS. It is a hardcore, specification-for-masses kind of book. It explains every detailed mathematical calculation that goes into deciding what to render/show from the css properties we provide. If you feel like css properties are just a few knobs that you turn until things look right, then this will teach you what turning those knobs really do and in effect, which ones to actually turn.

   If not anything, you'll learn to appreciate the complexity behind css. It is a must read for everyone, but some people might be turned off by its dryness.

   The author, Eric Meyer himself worked on css specifications - his blog and all of his books are worth a read. 4th edition of this book comes as a full book as well as many Chapterwise mini-books - printed books are hardly available in India, its better to go for a digital ebook on this one.

4. CSS3: The Missing Manual ****

   First things first, putting this book at the end of this list probably doesn't do it justice. It is a great book on its own, but I have personally always used it as a finishing touch to complement the previous book. It's a great practitioners' book covering the whole wide range of modern css topics (like advanced selectors, print css and media queries) with huge focus on practical use cases.

   From content coverage viewpoint, it covers wider range of topics while the previous one covers lesser topics with much more depth. Skimming through this book helps you fill all the gaps (topics which are very useful in day-to-day use, but probably dont require the same depth of understanding like selector specificity) left from reading just the previous book.

5. CSS-TRICKS

   It is a great resourceful website by Chris Coyier (https://chriscoyier.net/) filled with lot of articles covering practical css dev problems and few deep articles in css concepts, plus a great CSS reference (think, better MDN for CSS; Sorry, MDN!). It also has paid content, but I have never explored that section.

   If you ever have to search for something like "css three panel layout with same height", this is probably where you'll land up anyway.

Javascript

1. Professional JavaScript for Web Developers *****

   It is one of those detailed but slightly outdated books, which goes into a lot of details about object, prototypes, inheritance, data types, etc. It is very useful to understand how modern prototype inheritance patterns came to be. Its written by Nicholas C. Zakas, who was then a Yahoo engineer and later built eslint - which is very widely used today. I suggest reading this book for the core JS concepts and then topping it up with YDKJS for newer ES6/ES7 constructs.

2. You don't know JS *****

   The modern standard Javascript book, which is available for free reading on Github. Reading every chapter of this book is pleasantly surprising, as you really learn something new even if you think you already know that concept. I specially liked its treatment of scope and closure, spread and rest operator, arrow functions, promises, async and generators. This is a must read for intermediate and advanced developers.