Acknowledgments

It was not love at first sight with me and JavaScript. Yet today, it’s one of my two favorite programming languages. The other? Its little brother, CoffeeScript. The story of how I learned to stop worrying and love JavaScripting is a story shared by tens of thousands of programmers. I’d like to thank those who took JavaScript seriously from the start, shaping the rich development ecosystem the language enjoys today: John Resig, for creating the browser’s de facto standard library, jQuery; Jeremy Ashkenas, for producing CoffeeScript and the rich yet minimalistic Backbone.js framework; Ryan Dahl, for giving the language a robust server environment; and all the other programmers who’ve proven through their work that JavaScript is a first-class language after all.

Of course, love alone didn’t write this book. I’d like to thank the Pragmatic Bookshelf team for helping me thoroughly renovate my original KickStarted manuscript and raise it to the standard of quality that PragProg is famous for. Particular thanks go to managing editor Susannah Pfalzer, head honchos Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt, and most of all my editor, Jackie Carter. Their savvy and motivation have been invaluable.

Thanks also to my technical reviewers for this edition: Julien Biezemans, Christophe Porteneuve, Michael Ficarra, Travis Swicegood, and Lon Ingram. Special thanks to Karl Stolley for going above and beyond in multiple reviews. I’d also like to thank Stan Angeloff and Roly Fentanes for reviewing the original manuscript. Any remaining errors are entirely my fault.

Thanks, finally, to my employer, HubSpot, for supporting me as I brought this book to completion. After years of nomadic freelancing, I’ve finally found a home.