r/learnjavascript • u/david_fire_vollie • 8d ago

Is it worth reading You Don't Know JS: Async & Performance 1st ed?

I was going to read the 2nd ed version of You Don't Know JS: Async & Performance, but it's still in "todo".
Is it worth reading the 1st ed?
It was written 9 years ago.
I know it predates async/await, but I'm keen to learn how things work behind the scenes, so I'm hoping in that regard, things haven't changed too much and async/await is just syntactic sugar.

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u/sereikis 8d ago

the promise/event-loop material is still useful for understanding async/await; pair it with current async function docs rather than treating it as complete coverage. one useful check while reading: predict the order of synchronous logs, .then() callbacks, await continuations and setTimeout(..., 0) callbacks, then run the example in a browser.

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u/TheRNGuy 7d ago

Yes. 

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u/tambooby 7d ago

imo yes, read it. the async/await gap is easy to fill in afterward, but the deep dive into how the event loop and microtasks actually work is the hard part to learn elsewhere. thats the stuff that ages well.

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u/AgenteEspecialCooper 6d ago

Wow, I just read the linked 1st edition article. It's really good stuff, it explains core concepts in a very precise way.