The second edition ends with canceled volumes
You Don't Know JS Yet labels Sync & Async and ES.Next & Beyond canceled. If you're choosing a JavaScript reading plan, that belongs near the top of the decision. Kyle Simpson's series still has material worth studying, especially if you can write working code but struggle to explain how its variables resolve. You need to choose from what's available, with the edition labels in view.
The repository recommends Get Started, then Scope & Closures, followed by The Unbooks. Under that last heading, Objects & Classes is marked draft stable and Types & Grammar rough draft. The README also calls the series complete and closes it to contributions. A reading plan that assumes every listed volume will eventually become a finished second-edition book would misread those labels.
What happened when we ran it
We did not run You Don't Know JS in our sandbox: the November 4, 2026 record at commit 7a83c85 found no supported ecosystem, recorded the language as null and found no Dockerfile. There is no installation, build or test result to report. That boundary matters because this repository contains reading material, and the record does not evaluate the correctness of its examples or its effectiveness as teaching.
The recorded sandbox configuration listed 3 CPUs and 8 GB RAM, with image n/a. Those entries supply context about the lab, not requirements for reading the books. This review assesses the published text and its organization. It makes no claim that a sample program was executed or that reading the series produced a measured improvement.
Scope & Closures explains why a variable resolves
Chapter 2 of Scope & Closures follows a student lookup through global, function and loop scopes. Colored diagrams connect each variable to the scope where it was declared. The chapter distinguishes those variables from object properties, a detail that keeps the explanation tied to actual expressions instead of treating every name in the program alike.
The teaching choice is useful: the reader has to account for where an identifier belongs before reasoning about access from a nested block. A note also warns that its narrated runtime lookup is a teaching device, since compilation can already resolve references. That qualification gives you a way to use the diagram without mistaking it for a literal trace of every engine operation.
I would use this chapter with a colleague who can recognize a closure but cannot explain which surrounding binding it accesses. Ask them to annotate the scopes in a small function from their own work, then explain the result before checking it. That's a suggested study exercise, not one we performed or a learning outcome we measured.
The preface expects prior JavaScript experience
The preface explicitly assumes the reader is already comfortable with JavaScript. It warns first-time learners about the difficulty and recommends rereading sections with practice between them. If you're still learning how to write a function, this is a demanding place to start.
Its pace will also frustrate someone who needs an immediate recipe. The scope chapter spends substantial space on diagrams and imagined conversations between parts of an engine. That helps expose the reasoning behind a rule, but it takes longer to read than a reference entry. Choose it when the explanation is the work you want to do. Keep a reference nearby for the API detail you need to finish today's task.
Free reading comes with a named content license
The README makes the books available to read online for free and links the first edition separately. You can follow chapter links without setting up a development server. Check which edition a link opens before sharing a passage with a study group, since the current title list and older books are separate reading paths.
The content carries a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 license. That is a specific reuse condition to examine before adapting material for a course or distributing a modified edition. This review does not assess permission for a particular reuse. Reading access alone shouldn't be treated as an answer to that separate question.
Choose a task-based tutorial if practice needs more structure
The Modern JavaScript Tutorial organizes material into chapters, articles and tasks, with solutions stored alongside tasks. Choose it when that task-and-solution format would help you organize practice. You Don't Know JS Yet's preface instead asks you to interleave its explanations with practice in your own code.
Eloquent JavaScript provides the sources for its fourth edition and links the online book. Its README welcomes feedback through issues and pull requests. That makes it another book to consider, particularly if an open contribution route matters to your study group. We have no comparative learner results for these resources.
The cards leave setup, community support and maturity unassessed: we have no execution result, support-quality assessment or full-series teaching evaluation. Documentation receives 4/5 under an editorial scale where 1 means instructions leave major questions unanswered, 3 means usable guidance with gaps and 5 means independently checked coverage throughout. The explicit reading order, audience warning and scope explanation support 4, with draft volumes limiting the judgment.
Start with Get Started in the recommended order. Before committing a study group to the series, open Scope & Closures and decide whether its detailed explanations match how the group wants to learn. Give the canceled volumes no place on the schedule.