// the find
marijnh/Eloquent-JavaScript
The sources for the Eloquent JavaScript book
The source repository for Eloquent JavaScript, fourth edition — Marijn Haverbeke's well-regarded introductory programming book that teaches JavaScript by building real things (a game, a paint editor, a language interpreter). This is the book source, not a library or tool; you're here to read, contribute corrections, or fork a translation.
The chapter progression is genuinely well-designed: it goes from values and control flow all the way to writing your own programming language and a Node.js HTTP server, covering ground most intro books skip entirely. Exercise solutions are included in the repo under code/solutions, which is useful for self-checking without hunting the web. The build pipeline is straightforward — CommonMark source files, a Makefile, outputs to HTML and EPUB — making it easy to host your own version or diff changes across editions. Haverbeke actually maintains this; last push was March 2026 and the fourth edition reflects modern JS (ESM, async/await, proper modules).
The PDF build instructions are self-admittedly broken ('don't bother trying this unless you really need it, since this list has probably bitrotted again') — not a great sign for a book that ships a PDF. The repo has no test coverage for the build tooling itself, so if a build script regresses nobody will notice until someone runs make. Chapter 22 (fast code / workers) exists in the solutions directory but there's no corresponding 22_fast.md source file visible in the tree, suggesting the performance chapter may be incomplete or stripped from the public source. At 3k stars for what is genuinely one of the better JavaScript books out there, the repo is understarred mostly because readers use the website rather than the source.