#and if we want to get technical then Ivan would be a khan do to the line of rulers before him

[askthekingofclubs]

shouldnt Ivan be reffer to as Tzar, and the Clubs as a Tzary/Tzazardom/Federation?

Nah, while it’s heavily influcnaced by Russian history and fairy tales the kingdom of clubs is not exactly Russia

Shurgs

just kingdoms

Keeps it simple for my smooth brain

[destiniesfic]

132 Hours, Chapter 3:

“Let me step on your back,” I say abruptly.

Previous

Read chapter 3 on AO3, or read below:

“Sherlock Holmes.”

I barely have to think about it. “Sherlock Holmes was an omega.”

“No.” Cardan sounds totally affronted. “No way. How can you even say that?”

For lack of anything better to do, we have been playing this game for nearly an hour. Mostly fictional characters, but some historical figures, too, who are up for debate. As much as alphas would love to lay claim to every known conqueror, it just isn’t realistic. Cardan and I have already gone back and forth on Alexander the Great and Ivan the Terrible and Ghengis Khan. Designations live in a kind of middle space between gender and sexual orientation, so people make assumptions based on the way you present in society, but also whether you’re an alpha, an omega, or a mythical beta is, technically, no one’s business but yours. So, especially in older stories, these things go unsaid or are discreetly left for the reader to surmise.

“Why would he be an alpha?” I challenge.

Cardan is sitting in his corner, one leg propped up, elbow on knee, same as before. He shrugs. “I mean, he feels empowered to take charge in crime scene investigations, he’s assertive—”

“You’re thinking of the BBC reboot,” I scoff. “The way Conan Doyle wrote his Holmes wasn’t like that. He was an expert, yes, and knew it, but he admitted it when someone bested him, and he went out of his way to help vulnerable people. People who had been scammed, or… single women.”

As bad as it seems for omegas and women—especially omega women—now, it would have been even worse in the stratified Victorian era. We still have our strata, but they were more codified then:

Alpha men

Alpha women/omega men (depending on the situation)

Omega women

And, of course, it was all way worse when race and class got thrown in. The point is that someone like Violet Smith of “The Solitary Cyclist”—a woman, assumed omega, and poor—would have been in real trouble without Holmes’ help.

“So he’s an omega because he’s nice to widows?” Cardan asks, with a glare.

“No, he’s an omega because he pays attention,” I reply. “Alphas don’t need to pay attention the way Sherlock Holmes does. You just waltz in and traipse all over whatever or whoever and always get your way. Who cares about the details when you’re an alpha? But Sherlock Holmes looks hard at the little things. You don’t do that if you don’t have to, if you’re not used to walking into a room and assessing threats, figuring out the balance of power. All the time. Because it’s exhausting, but you have to do it.”

Cardan is quiet for a beat too long, and I realize I may have actually said more about myself than about Sherlock Holmes. But he spares me by saying, “Surely we’re not all that bad.”

I make a noncommittal sound.

“Your dad’s an alpha, right?” he continues. “He took you and Taryn in after your parents died. He didn’t have to do that.”

I have to keep myself from snorting. No one who’s met Madoc would ever describe him as particularly nice or even giving. “Did you know Vivi has a pet conspiracy theory that he killed our parents in the first place?”

“What?”

“Not himself, obviously. That he hired someone to sabotage the car we were in.” I don’t know why I tell him. The second it leaves my mouth it feels like a family secret, or an in-joke I’m not supposed to share. But I can’t stop talking. “I mean, it was just luck we weren’t killed, Taryn and Vivi and I. But my parents’ car was new. The brakes shouldn’t have given out like they did. Anyway, Vivi thinks he took us in because he felt guilty.”

“I mean, that’s… crazy to think your dad was involved.” But Cardan says it too slowly, and hastens to add, “He isn’t a supervillain.”

“Yeah, I know. Just with everything that happened after, the way he swooped in, she was always suspicious.” I feel my mouth twitch, but I don’t know whether I want to smile or scowl. “I think she wanted us to be like The Boxcar Children and run away to live in the woods.”

“Well, you’re getting the one-room, no-running-water experience now.”

I catch myself smiling—he’s funny—and force my mouth into a frown, scouring our little room again for anything useful. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Even the socket that would hold a bare lightbulb is empty. Finally, my eyes settle on the one tiny window, set close to the ceiling, letting in a meager amount of natural light that does seem to have grown brighter as we talked.

“Let me step on your back,” I say abruptly.

“You want to what?”

“Step on your back,” I repeat, exasperated. “Are you tall enough to reach that window without a stool?”

“No?”

“Well, neither am I.” I fold my arms. “So I’m going to need you to give me a boost.”

He arches a critical eyebrow. “Why don’t you just sit on my shoulders?”

I blink at him. “Because… I thought you wouldn’t want to put your head anywhere near my crotch? Given how I reek and all.”

“But you thought I’d want to be stepped on? Jesus.” Cardan rubs a hand over his face. “What do you think I’m into? Look, I’ll crouch down, you get on my shoulders and look out the window. It’s not like I’m putting my face in your vag.” I shudder, and he adds, “We’ll never have to talk about it again. Okay?”

“Sounds great to me,” I say.

He nods and crouches down. I am not prepared for the way my heart thumps in my chest at the sight of the guy who made my life miserable since I was in seventh grade, who pushed me during gym, who whispered vile things in my ear whenever he could, who empowered other kids to do the same or worse waiting for me to climb onto his shoulders with his head bowed. It’s not real power, it’s just temporary, but it is intoxicating.

Then Cardan says, “Taking your time, huh?” and I snap out of it.

“Why the rush?” I ask. “Got somewhere to be?”

“I was thinking anywhere but here would be great.” He looks up at me. “Whenever you’re ready.”

I swing my legs over him and let him hoist me up on his shoulders. I haven’t exactly been invited to participate in a ton of games of chicken fight in the pool, so it’s been some time since anyone carried me like this. Maybe not since Taryn and I were very small, just after our parents died, when Madoc would help us get things from high kitchen shelves. I gasp when I’m lifted. Cardan is strong enough that it seems effortless, but I also hear him let out a small grunt.

“Not a word,” I say, dreading the jab he might make about my weight. “Move me closer to the window.”

“I wasn’t going to say anything,” Cardan mutters, but he obliges.

I am extremely conscious of his hands on my bare thighs, the way his muscles shift under my shoulders. Some alphas, like the guy who tried to grab me at the party, are kind of muscle-bound in an unattractive way. Not Cardan. Cardan has just the right amount to be fit and lean, with the bare minimum amount of body fat, but not so much muscle that he tips over into ungraceful. He’s a sports car of a person, lithe and elegant. It’s no mystery why his shirtless TikToks get so many views.

I get my hands on the windowsill so he’s not bearing my full weight, and then I groan. “Bad news.”

“What?”

“Well, I definitely can’t fit through here. I can kind of see the sky, so I would guess it’s maybe ten a.m. Otherwise there’s just a window well. Plastic and dirt. I can’t make out our surroundings at all.” I sigh. “We’re in a basement.”

There’s an awkward pause, and then Cardan says, “At least we know for sure.”

“Yeah. Put me down?”

He does, and we go back to our respective seats, mentally reviewing what we know. The only door is, of course, locked from outside. The floor is bare concrete, the ceiling exposed insulation and tubing, so we might be in a storeroom of some kind, or an unfinished basement in an older house. Our kidnappers left us with absolutely nothing, so no phones. Even my keychain, with the Swiss army knife Madoc gave me before my first summer at sleep-away camp, is gone.

We are growing hungrier and more sullen with each passing minute when there is a knock at the door.

Cardan and I glance at each other from our opposite sides of the room. “Um,” I say. Are kidnappers supposed to be polite?

Cardan shrugs one shoulder, then straightens up, lifting his chin in a decidedly imperious way. Trying to summon some air of command, some macho alpha-ness that will help us out of this. It could work—it is half working on me, I begrudgingly admit to myself, because my stupid brain is wired that way—if we weren’t both grimy from sitting on the floor and still a little woozy from the drugs.

“Come in,” he calls.

The door is opened slightly, and the first thing to poke through it is the barrel of a pistol. A 9mm, by the looks of it. Cardan’s Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows.

“You kids willing to behave?” comes a voice. It’s a man’s voice, strangely melodious. I was expecting the sandpapery roughness of an old-school gangster. I know it’s stereotypical, but I’ve never been kidnapped before, and it’s not like they make a manual.

Cardan and I glance at each other again. I’m not sure what we’re looking to find in each other’s faces.

“Yeah,” I say. “We’re good.”

“Oh, good. I’d hate to shoot you.” The man pushes the door open the rest of the way, and I have to press my lips shut to keep from gasping. There are disfiguring scars that cut across his cheeks, down his jaw, even one across the bridge of his nose. I’m not even sure what makes scars like that, jagged and rough-edged. If it was a knife, it wasn’t clean work. Someone was making a point.

I am immediately relieved, though, because his resonant voice had made me think we could be dealing with a real alpha, someone whose words hold command. This man is of average height, average build. If not for the scars, for the obviously broken nose, he would be totally unremarkable.

“Who are you?” Cardan asks. I am reluctantly impressed that he manages to sound haughty in this situation. He’s sitting up straight with his back against the wall, one leg outstretched, the other bent, his foot planted on the floor. He’s resting his elbow on that knee, like it’s all effortless.

“Breakfast service,” replies the man, still pointing the pistol at us. He tosses a McDonald’s bag into the room, then he and the gun retreat, and the door shuts behind him. We hear the click of a lock and then, to my horror, the sound of a deadbolt sliding into place.

Cardan exhales and reaches for the bag.

“Don’t!” I exclaim. “Seriously, it might be drugged.”

“It—what?” he asks. “Now you decide to care about whether the food is drugged? This isn’t Flowers in the Attic, Jude. We’re hostages. They want to ransom us. They’re not going to poison us.”

I blink at him. “Flowers in the Attic? You’ve read a book?”

He rolls his eyes and reaches for the bag. “Well, if you’re not going to eat it, I will.”

When he opens the bag, the smell of sausage grease and egg hit me like a truck. My stomach growls. I am suddenly very aware that the last time I ate was before the party, and my nerves had kept me from eating much then. “What… is it?”

“Two McMuffins.” He looks up at me. “See? They don’t want to starve us. They’re keeping us alive.”

“They could still tamper with them. Sedatives or something. Keep us complacent, keep us from doing what we’re going to do, which is try to escape.”

Cardan arches an eyebrow. “Has anyone ever told you you’re unbelievably paranoid?”

I think of Taryn and purse my lips. “Did you know it wouldn’t kill you to take something seriously?”

He holds up one hand, fingers spread wide. “Okay. How about this. I eat a McMuffin because I am fucking starving, and if they put anything in it it’ll get me and work through my system faster. You can stay up scheming or whatever. If nothing happens after like fifteen minutes, you get to eat yours. Or if you decide to be stubborn, I’ll eat it. Deal?”

“It’ll be cold and gross.” I cross my arms. “But fine.”

“Good.” Cardan takes a McMuffin out of the bag—his hands are so big that it barely looks like enough food for him—and devours it in what must be record time. I turn my head away.

“Where’s the nearest McDonald’s, do you think?” I ask

“Huh?”

“We were in East Hampton. They don’t have one there.”

“Uh-huh. That’s a good point.” I look back to see Cardan sucking grease off his thumb. “Dunno. Closer to the middle of the island, maybe?”

“Maybe,” I echo quietly. Without knowing how long we were out, it seems impossible to figure out where they could have taken us. “You’re right. We couldn’t be in the city.”

Cardan shakes his head. “Nah, don’t think so. Too quiet, and like you said, that’s definitely daylight, so people’d be out and about.”

“Yeah,” I say, looking up at the window.

He looks at the window, too, but doesn’t say anything, and we lapse into silence. It’s strange, to be sharing space with him, to be quiet. I could never have imagined anything like it, not with our fraught history. There’s no world in which Cardan Greenbriar and I could be friends, but, at least temporarily, we are not enemies.

“Did you like it?” I asked at last, when the silence stops being neutral and begins to make me feel anew how tired and tense I am.

“Like what?”

“Flowers in the Attic.”

“Oh.” He blinks twice, his dark eyelashes fluttering. “I read it a few years ago, but, yeah. I did. You know, it was nice to read about a family that was more fucked up than mine.” He raises his eyebrows. “Spicy, too.”

I scoff. “How can your family be so fucked up you’d read a gothic novel for catharsis?”

Cardan drums his fingers on his knee. “How much do you know about my family?”

“You’re old money. One of those alpha families that claims they’re pure alpha for generations.” Which is pretty much impossible, but everyone in that tier of society tells the same lie. Half the kids in my school claim to be pure alpha, and on paper both of their parents are alphas. But while alpha men and women can reproduce—they have the right gametes—it’s not easy. More likely omega egg donors, and, before that, omega surrogates who were well-paid. It’s no wonder they see us as breeders.

I start ticking off additional facts on my fingers. “Your great-grandfather was one of the great American magnates, but it was his alpha daughter, Mab Greenbriar, who really made something of his millions. Your dad was her only son, so he inherited the whole corporation. You have five older siblings: Balekin, Elowyn, Dain, Caelia, Rhyia—”

Cardan holds up both his hands. “Yeah, yeah. I get the point.”

“It’s all on Wikipedia.” I shrug, and to sound less like a weird stalker, I add, “And Vivi and Rhyia are like best friends.”

“You know, and I know you said it before, but I do forget Vivienne’s your sister. She’s so cool.”

I roll my eyes. “Thanks.”

I get it, though. He probably thinks Vivi’s cool because she’s an alpha, but she also gets points for being the family rebel. Her biological dad, Madoc, adopted us all after the car crash that killed our parents, but she never wanted to be the natural successor he hoped for. Now she plays rugby at an all-girls’ college, has three cartilage studs and a septum piercing, shaves half her head, and is defiantly, unapologetically queer. It’s a different path than I would take, but marching to the beat of your own drum is definitely something that appeals to people.

“By the way,” Cardan says, “it’s been a few minutes and I feel fine. Well, as fine as one can feel having eaten only one McMuffin. I don’t feel any worse.”

“Okay.” I hold out my hand. “Toss me the bag.”

The bag crinkles when he picks it up, then he looks inside. “I think I’m owed a poison taster’s fee.”

“Huh?”

Cardan takes my McMuffin out of the bag, takes a bite out of it, then drops it back in the bag, which he proceeds to lob at my head. I catch it, face wrinkling in disgust. “Ew!”

“What? I need the calories more.”

I shake the bag at him. “I am not eating this,” I huff.

“We split the water bottle. That didn’t kill you.” Cardan sits back against the wall and closes his eyes. “Besides, who knows when they’re going to decide to feed us again?”

“You’re all so gross,” I mutter as I open the bag and pull out my breakfast. He’s right, and I hate that he’s right. I also hate that my hunger is enough to overcome my revulsion, at both the stolen bite and the undeniable fact that my McMuffin is now cold. I stuff it in my mouth, devouring the rest of it in only a few bites.

“Who’s gross?” he asks. “Alphas? Boys?”

“Alpha boys,” I inform him, with my mouth full.

“Big words from somebody whose designation’s known for leaking fluids everywhere.”

I fold my arms over my chest. “We’re not the only designation that leaks,” I point out. “We’re just the only one that gets shit for it. We’re the ones who’re thought of as gross while you and your type get to go around ruling the world.”

“Oh, sure. That has nothing to do with the way you guys are totally incapacitated for three straight days if you don’t take your drugs.”

“If we don’t get out of here, you’ll be just as screwed as I am,” I snap. “Stuck in a room with me? You won’t have a chance. We’re both going to become brainless fuck machines if that happens, so… shut the hell up.”

He does, to my surprise. I do too. I wipe my greasy hands on the McDonald’s bag, then crumple it into a little ball and toss it into the corner of the room. My anger is a living thing, running through my veins like electricity, vibrating under my skin. It’s been there for so long, but I would never have dared to say that to his face before. The rest of our situation is so absurd, so dire, it feels like there are no consequences for mouthing off at him.

That’s dumb, of course. There are always consequences. But at least they won’t be coming anytime soon.

“‘Brainless fuck machines,’” Cardan whispers quietly, and then he snickers.

“You—shut up,” I say, feeling unlikely mirth bubbling at the corners of my mouth. Cardan lets out another huff of laughter, and then I am giggling, and he’s laughing outright, clutching at his stomach. It’s ridiculous, all of my nerves coming out like that, but he’s laughing and it feels like there’s nothing for me to do but laugh too.

“Oh, man,” he says, wiping at his eyes. “I didn’t know you were a poet.”

“I’m serious!” I squeal, my abs cramping from laughing and trying not to laugh harder all at once. “That’s what happens!”

“God.” Cardan lets his head fall softly into the corner. “We are so screwed.” He points one finger up in the air. “Metaphorically. So far.”

“Jesus.” I cover my face with both of my hands. “Jesus.”

“Jesus was an alpha.”

I peek at him through my fingers. “He was not. He literally said ‘I am the Alpha and the Omega.’”

“I’m just fucking with you.” Cardan grins, his hair flopping in his face, but then his cheer vanishes abruptly. “Wait, you’re not actually religious, are you?”

I shake my head. “Not really.” But I still know that common theology holds that Jesus—and angels, and any other holy beings I don’t know about—are not alphas or omegas, but they aren’t betas, either. They are all things and nothing. Must be a good life. I pull my hands down and squint at him. “Were you worried about offending me?”

“Me?” Cardan shakes his head to toss his hair out of his face. “Nah.”

“Well, good.” I cross my arms again. “Because you’ve never cared before, and it’d really freak me out if you started now. Then I’d know we were both losing it for real.”

“I just thought…” He shrugs. “I mean, it’d be nice if one of us believed in something. That praying could help. I’d like to believe that. Seems tidy.”

“Yeah.” I let my cheek fall against the cold wall, too, and blink away the memories of screaming at the night sky, demanding someone give me my parents back. I can’t fall into that pit. I will not.

I just say, “I stopped believing that anyone was listening a long time ago.”

Cardan scratches at the wall with his finger. “Me too, Duarte,” he said. “Me too.”

Next

[t-baba]

An interview with the author of 'JavaScript: The Definitive Guide'

#490 — May 29, 2020

Unsubscribe  :  Read on the Web

👀 This week we have a fun bit of bonus content at the end of the issue — an interview with David Flanagan, someone who's written more JavaScript books than I've had hot dinners. 😆

JavaScript Weekly

Snowpack 2.0: A Build System for the Modern Web — Say bye-bye to your bundler and let modern browsers’ ES module support do the heavy lifting with Snowpack. Or if you need to target more than just modern browsers, you can always just use it to speed things up in development. This talk by Ryan Lanciaux introduces the idea of escaping using bundlers, if you’re new to this area.

Fred K. Schott

The Process of Making Vue 3 — We know a lot of you are excited about the next major version of Vue.js – the final release is due soon (betas available here) and here Evan talks about the process and how it differs from Vue 2 at a high level.

Evan You / Increment

New Course: Design Systems with Storybook & React — Learn to create a design system from scratch using React, and document the design system to share with your team using Storybook.

Frontend Masters sponsor

A First Look at Records and Tuples — An introductory look at two new compound primitive value types in the ECMAScript spec: Records and Tuples.

Axel Rauschmayer

▶  What's New in TypeScript — You might know Daniel better from all his TypeScript release posts, but here he is in video form with a brief TypeScript introduction followed by essentially a code and example-heavy ‘state of the union’ about where TypeScript is at and where it’s headed.

Daniel Rosenwasser (Microsoft)

htmx: Build Dynamic Pages Using HTML Attributes — Billed as the ‘successor to intercooler.js’, htmx lets you add dynamic Ajax-y elements, Server Sent Events (SSE), WebSockets and more to a site using just HTML attributes.

Big Sky Software

⚡️ Quick bytes:

🎉 Node.js is 11 years old this week.

💰 The company behind the React-based Gatsby framework has raised $28m in series B funding.

🎧 The TC39er podcast has continued to interview TC39 delegates and is at episode 4. Worth listening to if you want more 'inside baseball' of the JavaScript world.

💛 In the latest Stack Overflow survey results, JavaScript remains the most popular language. However, TypeScript is higher on the 'most loved' list.

💻 Jobs

JavaScript Developer at X-Team (Remote) — Join X-Team and work on projects for companies like Riot Games, FOX, Coinbase, and more. Work from anywhere.

X-Team

Find a Job Through Vettery — Vettery specializes in tech roles and is completely free for job seekers. Create a profile to get started.

Vettery

📚 Tutorials and Opinions

Analyzing the Performance of Notion's Electron App — I was going to save this for our React newsletter but it’s too good! A real deep dive into analyzing the performance of a desktop JavaScript app for a popular note taking service and some basic optimizations that can be done.

Ivan Akulov

ECMAScript 4: The Missing Version — If you were around the JavaScript world in the early 2000s, you might recall how long discussion around ES4 rumbled on before it ultimately fizzled out. Some of the ideas were picked up by ActionScript, as used by Flash, but it felt like we lost a lot of potential progress in that decade.

Evert Pot

3 Hacks to Level Up Your Dashboards — Watch this webinar to learn about three elements that will help you build better dashboards for your application.

Logi Analytics sponsor

Some Causes of Memory Leaks in JavaScript and How to Avoid Them — A primer on the basic ideas.

Ekaterina Vujasinović

How To Create Better Angular Templates with Pug — Pug is a template engine that allows you to write cleaner templates with less repetition.

Zara Cooper

A (Mostly) Complete Guide to React Rendering Behavior — Details on how React rendering behaves, and how use of Context and React-Redux affect rendering. There are a lot of concepts compressed into this article.

Mark Erikson

▶  A 50 Minute Deno Crash Course — A lot of people are cranking out Deno videos right now, but Traversy Media has a solid reputation for getting these things right. In 50 minutes we get a nice, balanced approach to Deno’s plus points, tooling, building an API, etc.

Traversy Media

Today’s JavaScript, From An Outsider’s Perspective — Lea is a JavaScript expert, of course, but she was trying to help a computer scientist friend work with JS and commented on the frustrations along the way.

Lea Verou

10 JavaScript Quiz Questions and Answers to Sharpen Your Skills — Lots of tidbits here to sharpen your skills and understanding, but keep in mind that not all JavaScript interviews will be like this(!)

Nick Scialli

🔧 Code & Tools

RoughNotation: A Small Library to Create and Animate Rough Annotations — Uses Rough.js for the handdrawn look. Lots of nice interactive examples on the page showing the diversity of annotation types.

Preet Shihn

AudioMass: A Full-Featured Web Audio Editing Tool in JavaScript — Runs entirely in the browser with no backend or plugins required. Impressive. Source here.

Pantelis Kalogiros

See Runtime Values Right in Your Editor as You Type — Quokka.js is a rapid prototyping playground for JavaScript & TypeScript. Code runs immediately as you type and results display in your editor. Discounted by 40% for the next few days.

Wallaby.js sponsor

Fluor.js: A High Level Way to Add Interactions and Effects to Pages — Think a modern jQuery-lite. Pretty short and sweet for what it is.

François Vaux

Angelfire: Add Custom Context Menus to Any Page Element — Hands up if the name of this project takes you on a nostalgia trip to the 90s.. 🙋‍♀️

Rishabh Anand

number-precision: Tiny Library for Basic but Precise Arithemetic — For when you don’t want 0.1 + 0.2 to equal 0.30000000000000004 😏

NEFE

Perspective: Streaming Pivot Visualization Via WebAssembly — An interesting use for WebAssembly here. Originally built for J P Morgan, Perspective is for building real-time high performance interactive visualizations, powered by a C++ engine compiled to WASM under the hood.

The Fintech Open Source Foundation

AppSignal Adds Next.js Integration - Automatically Adds Web Vitals Monitoring

AppSignal sponsor

Autopilot: A Cross-Platform Desktop Automation Library for Deno — Another example of where using Rust for dependencies opens up some fun options to Deno. If you’re using Deno, don’t forget our Deno Weekly newsletter where we’ll be focusing on things like this :-)

Divy Srivastava

vue-list-scroller: A Vue Component for Efficiently Rendering Large Lists — Uses the ResizeObserver API to help with creating a Twitter-like feed that has thousands of items, and supports infinite scroll.

Ivan Safonov

Notable Improvements to the Profiler in React DevTools 4.7.0 — This tweet thread from Facebook developer Brian Vaughn distills out the highlights from the changelog.

Facebook

💬 A Q&A with… David Flanagan Author of JavaScript: The Definitive Guide

David has been programming since 1981 and getting paid for it since 1985. In 2011, he started working at Mozilla. Since then he's worked as a full-stack engineer on MDN and at Khan Academy. He currently works on cloud software at VMware and is in the process of releasing the seventh edition of JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, a hugely popular JavaScript book published by O'Reilly.

Why a seventh edition now?

I allowed the sixth edition to become badly out of date (sorry!). So the seventh edition is a major, and long-overdue, update. Importantly, it covers ES2020 and even mentions some features expected to be formalized in ES2021. Also new in this edition is a detailed chapter on Node, reflecting the reality that JavaScript isn't just for web browsers anymore.

(Ed: David has written more on what's new in the seventh edition here.)

What was the story behind writing the first edition?

I started on it shortly after I wrote Java in a Nutshell. In those days the buzz around Java was that Java "applets" could add dynamic content to web browsers. JavaScript seemed like a promising alternative and I remember talking to an engineer from Sun Microsystems (the company that created Java) about what I was going to work on next. When I told him I thought JavaScript might become more important in the browser than Java, he scoffed. But seven editions of my book later, I'm starting to think I was right(!)

What's your favorite chapter?

Most interesting JavaScript code is asynchronous, and now that Promises are a core part of the JavaScript language, I dedicate chapter 13 to asynchronous programming with callbacks, events, Promises and async/await.

Promises are a revolutionary addition to JavaScript, but once you move beyond the simplest examples, it becomes very easy to misuse them and you need to understand them deeply in order to use them correctly and with confidence. So I devote more than 20 pages to explaining them in depth. These are some of the most complicated pages in the book, but if they increase the understanding of Promises, I'll feel I've provided an important service to the community.

You've spent so much time writing books about JavaScript, but what other technologies interest you?

I'm intrigued by both Go and Rust and would enjoy documenting those languages. I've thought about writing short books about React and Angular. And I've wondered whether it is possible to write an interesting book about coding for a non-technical audience.

What's the secret to being able to write so many programming books?

No secret, really: from about 1991 to 2011 I was self-employed and for most of that time, writing books was my primary job. This 7th edition of JavaScript: The Definitive Guide is the first book I've written while also working a regular software engineering job.

You can find David on Twitter @__DavidFlanagan or more about JavaScript: The Definitive Guide at O'Reilly Media.

by via JavaScript Weekly https://ift.tt/2BilxR3