How to read the ECMAScript specification

The ECMAScript Language specification (a.k.a. the JavaScript specification, or ECMA-262) is a great resource for learning the intricacies of how JavaScript works. However, it is a huge text that can be confusing and intimidating at first.

This document aims to make it easier to get started with reading the ECMAScript spec.

Helping out

The HTML document is generated using Bikeshed, a document preprocessor. The source file is located in index.bs. Feel free to improve this document by submitting pull request that change this file.

To view the result of any changes to index.bs, you can locally regenerate index.html by installing Bikeshed first, and then running make from the project root directory.

If you do not want to install Bikeshed locally, then make will still work, by uploading your local copy of index.bs to api.csswg.org which will then run Bikeshed remotely. This process may produce a slightly different output than locally installed Bikeshed, as it does not take into account the customized .include files.

License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, which is available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/. Parts of this work may be from another specification document. If so, those parts are instead covered by the license of that specification document.