At the beginning of March, a series of lucky draw events were held on various public accounts. It turned out that the Chinese version of the seventh edition of the classic “Rhino book”, “JavaScript Authoritative Guide”, was released. Unable to wait for the lucky draw, I couldn’t wait to buy a copy. This book is relatively new, covering all the content before ES2020, can start.

Today I mainly want to see what changes there are in the seventh edition of rhinoceros book through the form of comparison with the sixth edition.

One, the book is thinner!

The first big change is that the books are thinner! Everyone knows that the sixth edition has more than 1000 pages. Such a thick book is really out of touch with the masses. In the seventh edition, the length is less than 600 pages, and the number of pages is almost halved! The reason for the smaller length is also explained in the book. Nowadays, with the popularity of the Internet, there is no need to put reference materials into paper books. It is ok to look at the MDN website directly.

Second, the translator changes

The second change is that the translator has changed. The author of the seventh edition is Li Songfeng, who has 15 years of technical translation experience, and the fourth edition of the classic “Little Red Book” JavaScript Advanced Programming. And the sixth edition was taobao front-end team to do the translation, it was in 2011, between ten years of tremendous changes, today saw the translator, inadvertently found familiar with the Two yunqian and Jade uncle in the column, now two people have from Taobao to the ant, big ten years ago the personal introduction is so young:

Iii. Update to ES2020 — Comprehensive content upgrade

The third change is content. There are very big updates to the content with new classes, modules, iterators, generators, promises, async/await, and significant changes to sections. One thing to note here is that Promise is translated as a term in this book.

In the decade since, JavaScript has evolved so rapidly that version 6 was written on ES5. Since 2015, ES6 (2015) has opened a new chapter of JavaScript, and the ECMAScript specification has been changed to annual release, so there are (ES2016, ES2017, ES2018, ES2019, ES2020). On March 9, The final feature set of ES2021 has been finalized and is expected to become the latest JavaScript standard in June, as I translated this article. Since the TC39 process was created, the ECMAScript version has become less important, and as the version increases, it becomes more difficult for users to follow the ES version of a feature, so we often refer to the ES6 generation after ES2015.

4. JavaScript ecology changes and changes in the past decade

The biggest disadvantage of printed books is that they cannot be updated in the same way as websites, especially in languages like JavaScript, where new features become new standards every year. However, we can glimpse the development of JavaScript from the ten years between the two versions, and see which ones remain unchanged and which ones are washed away by the tide of The Times.

Here is the latest edition of the Rhino Book Catalog brain Map:

The main points of comparison with the sixth edition are as follows:

  • The main constants are lexical structures, types, values and variables, expressions and operators, statements, objects, arrays, functions; Note the new content in ES6 in these sections.

  • Classes and modules become a separate chapter. After a decade of JavaScript modularization technologies, ESM has finally arrived, and the era of native modules has arrived.

  • Regex and subsets and extensions have been incorporated into the JavaScript standard Library chapter, where the authors have incorporated new feature sets, maps and regex, dates, errors, JSON, internationalization, console APIS, URL apis, timers, and more in new dimensions.

  • Iterators, generators, asynchrony, and metaprogramming sections have been added to show their importance.

  • The JavaScript section in browsers has been retained, incorporating version 6’s separate chapters on Window objects, scripted documents, scripted CSS, event handling, scripted HTTP, client storage, multimedia, graphic programming, and HTML 5 apis. And deleted the jQuery class library chapter, the era of jQuery is gone forever.

  • The seventh edition added a chapter on Node server JavaScript. Born in 2009, Node was not valued by the author at that time, and was not reflected in the sixth edition at all. However, the rapid development of Node in the past ten years brought tremendous changes to the front-end ecosystem. Node is also playing an increasingly important role in the JavaScript ecosystem.

Fifth, the construction of knowledge map is the most important

Actually with the front frame is relatively stable over the past two years, the front of ecology has entered the mature period, in the face of the complicated technology, construction of knowledge map is especially important for the front-end of PALS, from classic tutorial as you can see the author’s comb JavaScript knowledge context, to our construction of knowledge map provides the important reference. The new rhino book is worth buying.

At the request of the comment section, I got the fourth edition of “The Little Red Book”. Sneak peek:

The book contains a learning path map: