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For some reason the Rust community loves to write countless lines of boilerplate code to achieve very simple things, and Luca Palmieri is no exception - the book starts out with a simple program, but with each chapter he adds structs, functions, more structs ontop of the existing structs and tons of boilerplate in general, just so that he can save two lines of code at some other place.

Then, he goes on to pull in hundreds of third party packages for an application that is supposed to run on a public server, being exposed under a public port - without batting an eye. There is not even a footnote that running such an mount of third party code might be a security concern. And keep in mind that these hundreds of packages wouldn't be required to accomplish the task at hand in the first place, if it wasn't for Palmieris love for boilerplate constructs.

Furthermore, the writing style is annoying - the author uses words like "empowerment" or "black magic" when talking about software development/programming. This is topped off with an emotional style using words like "awesome" or "yay" when talking about command-line tools, which I personally just find unnecessary.

You even encounter things like "yesssssss" or "what the fuck", making this really hard to read without cringing to the floor every other paragraph.

The positive thing about the book is that the author arranged the information in the same way you would go about stumbling yourself doing something like this - trying something out, failing, trying something else, succeeding, and then he explains why this works the way it does. For me personally, this style of learning fits much better than the books that present one concept per chapter, without any room for common errors or similar.

Nevertheless, I can't give this book more than one star for the complete lack of thoughts regarding the security implications of pulling tons of unnecessary dependencies in your project. He even claims that the book is supposed to teach Rust to programming beginners. I fear that one day I will have someone on my team who learned to "develop" software with the practices shown in this book; undoing that damage will take years.

This is one of those books where its clear that the author made up some course on how to teach a subject to someone, but the author did not learn the particular subject in this way. That means she can’t even know what’s effective and what’s not; many books are like this.

The book contains lots of rambling and a list of various helping techniques, but it does not actually teach you "how to draw". It expects that you actually can draw and adds some techniques on top which feel like are intended for people that want to go from "I draw as a hobby 8h/day" to "I want to draw professionally and sell my pictures".

For instance, in the very beginning, you are supposed to draw a profile of a person – but the author just assumes that you can do this. I can’t. And the book does not teach you how to do it, so I don’t think is is a "complete idiot’s guide".

While this is a sufficient introduction to JavaScript for C(++) programmers, this book falls short on a couple of things.

1. There are no solutions to the exercises. Of course if you study the material thoroughly, refer to other sources etc. you can solve all of them, but this takes a lot of time and therefore is hardly for the "impatient", as the title promises. Even worse is that the text sometimes refers to an exercise, but without the solution you have no choice but to skip this part, if you have as little time as the author suspects.

2. While the material is well presented and well explained (I had almost never the need to refer to other sources for understanding), the book is not very engaging. This is an issue in a lot of programming books, where the material is presented like in an encyclopedia, without building any motivation as a reader to go forward. Good programming books have something in it so that you stick with them, e.g. a project to build while you read, which is finished at the end of the book.

3. I could have really done without the Alice illustrations. I kept forgetting which symbol meant which, and using the picture of a kitten for an advanced topic is counterintuitive (at least that is how I experienced it). Putting the words "beginner/intermediate/advanced/pro" in the margin would have served the same purpose, but with much less headache.

In conclusion this book is so-so, but it is much better than anything about modern JavaScript that I found online, and any other JavaScript book I know of. Therefore I would still recommend it.