Who This Book Is For

If you’re interested in learning CoffeeScript, you’ve come to the right place! However, because CoffeeScript is so closely linked to JavaScript, there are really two languages running through this book—and not enough pages to teach you both. Therefore, I’m going to assume that you know some JavaScript.

You don’t have to be John “JavaScript Ninja” Resig. In fact, if you’re only an amateur JavaScripter, great! You’ll learn a lot about JavaScript as you go through this book. Check the footnotes for links to additional resources that I recommend. If you’re new to programming entirely, you should definitely check out Eloquent JavaScript [Hav11], which is also available in an interactive online format.^[7] If you’ve dabbled a bit but want to become an expert, pick up Effective JavaScript [Her12].^[8] And if you want a comprehensive reference, no one does it better than the Mozilla Developer Network.^[9]

You may notice that I talk about Ruby a lot in this book. Ruby inspired many of CoffeeScript’s great features, such as implicit returns, splats, and postfix conditionals. And thanks to the Rails Asset Pipeline, which makes CoffeeScript compilation fully automatic, CoffeeScript has a huge following in the Ruby world. So if you’re a Rubyist, great! You’ve got a head start. If not, don’t sweat it; everything will fall into place once you have a few examples under your belt.

If anything in the book doesn’t make sense to you, I encourage you to post a question about it on the book’s forum.^[10] While I try to be clear, the only entities to whom programming languages are completely straightforward are computers—and they buy very few books.