We just brought in Douglas Crockford to do a department-wide training for all of our front-end engineers, as part of the O'Reilly Training Master Classes, and it was a phenomenal experience.

Douglas Crockford is a master level engineer able to converse and explain about the most advanced implementations of the language, and because of his history and perspective with the language he was able to illustrate the intentions behind of some of the language features and quirks. He beautifully walked through prototypal and functional inheritance and was able to explain very esoteric questions surrounding comparisons to classical inheritance.

Bringing in Douglas for this class was an investment in our internal talent. We held a postmortem on the training session and the very level of discourse about JavaScript, the topics and way we discussed JavaScript were raised. It was like we had all leveled up our JavaScript skills. We all were excited to start writing better JavaScript.

To prepare for the training I read his book - JavaScript: The Good Parts, and in doing so discovered a new modern classic. It's concise and profoundly comprehensive.

I can't recommend this training course enough to bring your already advanced resources up to the next level. It's an investment in your resources and an investment in the quality of your code base.

Read more from Tom Barker.