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Great, quick read that will help any new or intermediate JavaScript or web developer get more familiar with OOP JavaScript.

The best parts of the book for me coincide with the things I am learning at Treehouse during their OOP JavaScript course in the full-stack JavaScript Track.

As far as the OOP nature of JavaScript. A lot of the syntax and ideas borrow heavily from Java and it is evident when I am writing in JS. Fortunately, the book stresses the Prototypal Inheritance of JavaScript instead of thinking about it in a Classical Inheritance type of way. Eric Elliott has already crooned the virtues of Prototypal Inheritance, which is a feature of JavaScript people either love or hate.

I learned a lot in this book, that really just gave me a slightly more in depth look into the stuff I was already learning. Having gone to Pitt for two semesters and taking CS classes, a lot the OOP stuff was familiar as Java is a Classical OOP language. But thinking about it in the JavaScript way was helpful. Four stars.

Cal Newport lays out his arguments for "going deep" — uninterrupted, long, and intense periods of focusing on the work that is going to further your goals quite well in this book.

I rarely disagreed with him and when I did it was because I was guilty of so much of his arguments against shallow work — email, Twitter, Facebook — all those non-essential, non-urgent, and non-important tasks that cause the dreaded decrease in focus from task switching (multitasking) which the effects of have long been debated. We know it takes a period of time from when you're working on a computer program and you switch to Twitter to recover that intense focus. The more you task switch, the worse it gets.

The book made me uncomfortable because I realized how much time I was squandering; how much I wasn't learning or practicing a certain skill. How many hours I've spent mindlessly scrolling Facebook on my phone. I also know I really don't know how to stop.

Cal offers great suggestions and I have a few plugins and tools to make this easier. Being comfortable with being bored is difficult for many. Cal encourages his readers to force boredom on themselves and to stick with it. The more practice you have the easier it will get and the closer you'll come to performing "deep work".

The book made take a long hard look at myself and for me that's worth five stars.

Practical advice is practical.

He failed to mention audiobooks in the heart of the book, instead adding it to the Appendix. I thought it was worth more of an exposè. Considering this book was written in 2013 or so, I'm pretty certain Audible was an Amazon company by then and audiobooks were more mainstream.

In any case, the advice was solid, the book didn't cost a lot. Decent read.

Synergy is a terrible buzzword.

I listened to a few chapters and decided this kind of "wisdom" really wasn't wisdom at all, just prepackaged, pre-Deepak Chopra nonsense.

But Stephen Covey is the man for keeping this machine running, even after his death with The 5 Choices, a reboot of this tripe for the digital age with three annoying narrators and a truckload of shite.

$$$$$$. That's what this book is about.