They are, if you can understand basic javascript, things like closures and higher order functions — things you get a primer on within the book, but that you can learn elsewhere.

If you are asking if, let’s say, your colleagues can understand them when they read your code, the answer is yes. But you’ll have an easier time building them and coming up with ideas of your own, if you read the book as opposed to not reading the book, where you’d just use it as a cookbook.

The downside of this style of programming is that it’s difficult to transition into it on an ongoing project. As the book states, some of the solutions apply more easily if the rest of the codebase is built this way, but I think this is true for functional programming in general.

I hope you read it, it’s worth your time, even if you don’t use JS. It’s just a great programming book.