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Ask HN: Best HTML5/CSS3/JavaScript books/tutorials for a kernel engineer?

4 points by sown ↗ HN
So I've spent most of my years as an embedded and linux kernel engineer but I think I'd like to make a move to web-apps.

About me: My favorite books is either O'Reilly's Programming Embedded Systems in C/C++ or "An Embedded Software Primer". Perhaps even old, old, old issues of Dr. Dobbs.

I learned programming by doing, not reading endless amounts of theoretical material about it, so any kind of materials that emphasize doing is preferable. I've been going through Udacity's CS253 course and found it neat and very helpful. I've searched around for info about the web-app front end material but none of it really crystallized for me or I just found it to be really boring. Perhaps you know of some better ones?

Any help would be appreciated.

6 comments

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thetabyte
Douglas Crockford's "Javascript: The Good Parts" was indispensable for me when learning Javascript, and cheap too. I highly recommend it.
sown
Thanks for this pointer.
thetabyte
Also, if you're going to make webapps, you'll need more then HTML, CSS, and JS. You'll need a framework (well, need being a relative word) for database storage and the like. Many exist (Django for Python, Rails and Sinatra for Ruby, etc), but as a personal recommendation, Rails is extremely powerful and has a vibrant community. Plus, Michael Hartl's Ruby on Rails tutorial is available in HTML as a free book, and will walk you through every step of creating a web app.
sown
Thanks for that pointer. I've been messing around with Django. I figure backends seem to change but CSS3/HTML5/JS seems to be the triumvirate for the time being.
bonsai
I would suggest you to read Dmitry Soshnikov blog, it has great level of details http://dmitrysoshnikov.com/tag/ecma-262-3/.

This 3 books are great reading material: 1) JavaScript: The Good Parts - Douglas Crockford, 2) High Performance JavaScript - Nicholas C. Zakas, 3) JavaScript Patterns - Stoyan Stefanov

HaitoH3
I agree and Javascript Web Applications by MacCaw