Update 2011-06-25: “Prototypes as classes” is an improved version of this blog post.

This blog post explains JavaScript’s prototypal inheritance in a simple way. As it turns out, if we initially leave out constructors, then it is easy to understand. Thus, we first look at the fictional programming language ProtoScript which is JavaScript minus constructors, explain it, and then move on to constructors. As a result, you should have a solid understanding of prototypal inheritance and won’t be confused, any more, by all the JavaScript tricks out there.

Each of the following eight books has greatly influenced how I think about software development. Note that this list is not exhaustive, there are obviously other important books out there, many of whom I have not read (yet).

Updates:

• JavaScript’s strict mode: a summary
• es5-shim: use ECMAScript 5 in older browsers

ECMAScript is a language standard that is implemented as JavaScript in most web browsers (it’s called JScript in MS Internet Explorer). Here are two good links to get up to date on the latest version, ECMAScript 5:

The “browser as a platform” is coming along nicely. The following are a few recent developments.

An article examines “Google Maps and Label Readability”. From this article, we can derive the following rules for the design of graphical user interfaces in general (the following numbers and “visual tricks” refer to section in the article). Google Maps manages to be more readable than the competition without showing less information (as measured by a count of labels). It does so via the following means.

Whenever I send automated emails, I prefer to have one last look at them, before sending them off. The following method allows one to do this, as all of the generated emails are opened in your default email program, complete with recipients, subject, and content. Thankfully, this is easy to do, by just sending a properly encoded URL to the operating system. Doing this depends on java.awt.Desktop and thus Java 6.