5 Awesome Free Books for JavaScript Developers

Our top 5 books for JavaScript developers are well worth reading. Today, we will show you some ebooks to learn JavaScript and Node.js. The coolest thing is that you don't need to spend your money to buy it because all books are open-source and free to read!

1. Eloquent JavaScript Second Edition

This is a book about JavaScript, programming, and the wonders of the digital.

The book contains roughly three parts. The first eleven chapters discuss the JavaScript language itself. The next eight chapters are about web browsers and how JavaScript is used to program them.

Finally, two chapters are devoted to Node.js and another environment to program JavaScript. Throughout the book, there are five project chapters, which describe example programs to give you a taste of real programming.

In order of appearance, we will work through building an artificial life simulation, a programming language, a platform game, a paint program, and a dynamic website.

What you'll learn?

• Introduction to JavaScript

• Values, Types, and Operators

• Program Structure

• Basic Data Structures: Objects and Arrays

• Functions and Higher-order Functions

• The Secret Life of Objects

• Bugs and Error Handling

• Using Regular Expressions in JavaScript

• Modules

• JavaScript and the Browser

• The Document Object Model

• Handling Events

• Drawing on Canvas

• HTTP protocols

• Forms and Form Fields

• Basics of JavaScript into Node.js

Conclusion: It's a book for beginners who know the basics of programming. In this book, you will learn deeply about the JavaScript language, how to manipulate the HTML DOM (Document Object Model) using JavaScript, about drawing graphical objects using Canvas, how to handle errors, bugs, and events, how the HTTP protocols work using Ajax and how to play with JavaScript under the Node.js environment.

Author: Marijn Haverbeke

2. Understanding ECMAScript 6

This book is a guide for the transition between ECMAScript 5 and 6. It is not specific to any JavaScript environment, so it is equally useful to web developers in general it is for Node.js developers.

What you'll learn:

• What are the changes in the language between ECMAScript 5 and ECMAScript 6?

• How to work with the new class syntax

• Iterators and Generators

• How and when to use arrow functions instead of regular functions

• How to store data using Sets, Maps, and more

• Inheriting from native types

• Work using Promises for asynchronous programming

• How to organize code in modules

Conclusion: This is a book for programmers who wanna upgrade their JavaScript knowledge. The basics of JavaScript are required to understand this book. All content is related to the new JavaScript implementation, the ECMAScript 6 (aka ES6 or ES2015). This book will guide you to migrate to this new implementation, showing the differences between the old ES5 and the new ES6 features.

Author: Nicholas C. Zakas

3. Learning JavaScript Design Patterns

In this book, we will explore how to apply both classical and modern design patterns to the JavaScript programming language. It's targeted at professional developers wishing to improve their knowledge of design patterns and how they can be applied to JavaScript.

Some of the concepts covered (closures, prototypal inheritance) will assume a level of basic prior knowledge and understanding. If you are interested in reading further about these topics, a list of suggested titles is provided for convenience. If you would like to learn how to write beautiful, structured, and organized code, we believe this is the book for you.

What you'll learn?

• Introduction to Design Patterns

• JavaScript Anti-Patterns

• JavaScript Design Patterns

• JavaScript MV* Patterns

• Modular JS Design Patterns

• jQuery Design Patterns

Conclusion: This is a must-have book for all JavaScript developers! This book is one of the best free books for JavaScript, the author - Addy Osmani - explains deeply about anti-patterns and design patterns.

All content will teach you how to code better and how to code using the right pattern for the problem you want to solve. The basics of JavaScript are required for well understanding of this book.

Author: Addy Osmani

4. Node.js Succinctly

Node.js is a wildly popular platform for writing web applications that have revolutionized web development in many ways, enjoying support across the open-source community as well as industry.

With Node.js Succinctly, you will learn the basics of non-blocking I/O, the event loop, modules, and the Node.js runtime environment. From there, you will dive into building practical solutions that interact with filesystems and streams, access databases, handle web server message queuing, and more.

What you'll learn?

• The Node.js Ecosystem

• How to use Filesystem and Streams

• Building Web Applications

• Real-Time Apps with WebSocket

• How to integrate a database

• Messaging with RabbitMQ

• Build and Testing tools

Conclusion: If you wanna improve your JavaScript skills working on a backend platform, Node.js will be a good choice this book will teach you how to work under a Node.js runtime environment, how to build web applications with real-time interactions via HTTP & WebSocket protocols, how to send messages using RabbitMQ and how to work with useful tools for build and testing your server-side code.

Author: Emanuele DelBono

5. Module Patterns

The first short book of this series is a brief introduction that sets the foundation for the next books to come. It shows what you can do with JavaScript and the Node module system to create and consume different types of modules: Singletons, Closure-based and prototype-based pseudo-classes, facades, and others.

What you'll learn?

• Introduction to Modules

• How to return the exported value

• Working with modules in the browser

• Module registry

• Transitive module loading

• Node.js module system

• Types of Modules

Conclusion: This book requires, at least, intermediate knowledge of JavaScript and Design Patterns. You will learn deeply, the concepts about the Module Patterns and how to work with the main module's systems for the backend via Node.js and frontend environments.

Author: Pedro Teixeira

Conclusion

If you wanna find more free books, just take a look at this site DevFreeBooks. Please note that not all books are free for download, in this case, you can read them online for free.

Do you know another cool and free book for JavaScript? Let us know!