Introducing Deno is (as it says on the tin) an introduction to Ryan Dahl's 'take two' on Node.js, this time targeting TypeScript using V8 and Rust. Weighing in at 150 pages, the book is a very brief, whirlwind tour of Deno's features, presented in contrast to their counterparts in Node.js and providing some background behind why certain design decisions were made.
Overall, while I appreciated the author's efforts to highlight the lessons that Ryan Dahl learned from his work on Node.js, I really felt like the book lacked an overall 'cohesion' to the material presented for a couple of reasons. The first is the lack of specification for the audience: it isn't laid out from the outset who the target audience is (JavaScript developers? People who've used TypeScript? Node.js experts?), and this leads to a sort of 'mish-mash' of topics. For example, the TypeScript chapter was incredibly brief, and it's inclusion seemed puzzling since it's not deep enough for someone with no TypeScript experience, and at the same time just a rehash for those already used to TypeScript. You can also see this in a later chapter where decorators are dropped into the sample code, but were never explained in the TypeScript overview.
The second reason is that the end goal for the reader isn't made clear, and this is something I think technical books really need to nail down to be effective: the reader should be able to clearly say "after reading $BOOK, I should be able to do $THING". The reason this is really important is because without a clear path to an end goal, it's tough to distinguish between the things you need to understand well and the things you can sort of just quickly gloss over. I think the book would've been served better by having a clear goal of what the reader should expect to be able to do with Deno by the time they've reached the end. This not only gives the author a clear metric for what to include (and not include!) in the book, and it gives the reader a clear metric for whether or not their understanding of Deno has appreciably improved.
Overall, I think these reasons, and the lack of editorial polish I found in a few places in the book really prevent this book from being as good as it could have been.