Responsible JavaScript

What a treasure of a book.

Covers so much ground in less than 200 pages—from accessibility to toolchains to third-party scripts—but I think that main theme here is performance—Wagner comes back to it over and over. Managing the resources that your users have and building with their interests in mind.

That's maybe the other main theme: that your first and most important priority is the experience of your users. Measuring and collecting analytics always comes second to providing a performant experiences to the users of your site or application. It's not always practical—a fact that Wagner acknowledges in the closing pages of the book—but it's something that we always need to keep front-of-mind for the sake of everyone on the net.

The amount of code was also a surprise here; I was expecting something a little bit more theoretical. But there are tons of examples that you could lift wholesale from the page and drop into an application: snippets for lazy-loading <img> and <iframe> elements, snippets for writing Content Security Policies, snippets for enhancing forms. This, more than anything, makes Responsible JavaScript—like a good mentor—a resource that I expect to come back to regularly in the future.