A bookmarklet is a bookmark whose URL (web address) contains a small program that does something useful with the currently displayed web page. To execute the program, you click on the bookmark.

Keywords are commands you can enter in the browser address bar to quickly go to a website and perform, say, a search.

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

In this post we present the Proto API which implements inheritance in JavaScript in a purely prototypal fashion. This contrasts it with all other JavaScript inheritance APIs that the author is aware of.

JavaScript is relatively weak when it comes to reflection and metaprogramming. Let us see what you can and cannot do. This post uses some of the standard methods of ECMAScript 5 (ES5).

A JavaScript shell (interactive command line) is great for trying out stuff. This post shows three ways of getting such a shell.

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).