You may have been told, or felt yourself, that JS is a deeply flawed language that was poorly designed and inconsistently implemented. Many have asserted that it’s the worst most popular language in the world; that nobody writes JS because they want to, only because they have to given its place at the center of the web. That’s a ridiculous, unhealthy, and wholly condescending claim.

Like any great language, it has its brilliant parts as well as its scars. Even the creator of JavaScript himself, Brendan Eich, laments some of those parts as mistakes. But he’s wrong: they weren’t mistakes at all. JS is what it is today—the world’s most ubiquitous and thus most influential programming language—precisely because of all those parts.

Every part of JS is useful. Some parts are more useful than others. Some parts require you to be more careful and intentional.

My unreserved claim is that you should go about learning all parts of JavaScript, and where appropriate, use them! And if I may be so bold as to suggest: it’s time to discard any JS books that tell you otherwise.