Authors Writing JavaScript

Now a Book!

Recently I had a dream in which I set homework assignments for Ernest Hemingway and twenty-four other literary luminaries. Each author received one of five tasks--common coding problems, mostly mathematical--which they were to solve using JavaScript.

To my astonishment, after a few days, completed assignments started arriving in my mailbox. Still more remarkable, with the exception of Kafka's accursed effort, they all seemed to work.

Naturally this was all too good to keep to myself so I've reproduced their solutions in this book. To help put the answers in context, I've written a short biography of each author, and followed their code with a brief explanation of what I think they were up to. As a respite between assignments I've included some poetic interludes: long forgotten odes documenting their author's struggle with everyone's favorite programming language.

See also my JSConf presentation and feel free to add your own pull requests as the inspiration takes you!