Spotlight customer reviews:
|
Customer Rating:  
Summary: For reference only
Comment: Having bought O'Reilly books before, I should have known better than to pick up this one. It follows the same pattern of giving far too much theoretical information without following up with good examples of the concepts in use.
The Core Javascript language section is great, and I can definitely see that the Core and Client-Side Javascript Reference sections will eventually be of great use to me. However, the Client-Side Javascript section is next to useless for learning how to pull all of the concepts together, and implement javascript on your web pages.
If you're already very familiar with javascript and need a reference book, by all means, buy this book. If you want to learn javascript programming, look for something else.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not as terse as ECMA-262, not as crufty as any other options
Comment: Whether you are expert in the field or just familiar with programming in general and want to become expert in the field, this book is for you. It's not a cookbook, and you will not use it for cut-and-paste programming, as is your common plague in javascript litterature. It will give you access to the innards of the language though, teach you relevant history, and the reference parts include lots of oh so useful and hard to track down facts about which browsers lack (or have flawed implementations of) which objects, methods, constructs and the like.
It's not full coverage, especially not regarding fairly recent APIs such as XMLHttpRequest and, until recently rather small and obscure browser platforms such as Opera and the Macintosh browser families, but it's a good step on the way and most likely heading that direction. I've seen past editions tag along with happenings in the ecmascript world fairly well so far, and expect future editions to do the same.
This book gets you on top of the tech relatively effortlessly and quickly, and its reference sections have saved me heaps of time. That last star is saved for the next edition that brings it back in touch with the web development frontlines again.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The book for the novice and experienced JS programmer
Comment: This book is excellent. Helped me within hours start programming in JS. Excellent reference that includes also the relevant html fundamnentals a programmer needs to know. JS without html is hanging in the air. The author realized that and delivered something very useful to the community.
Customer Rating:
Summary: THIS BOOK IS NOT ABOUT THE JAVAN RHINOSEOUROS!
Comment: Great no-nonsense JavaScript Book which contains both theory, tutorial and a comprehensive JS reference. Covers JavaScript up until version 1.5. This is no disneyland stuff, this is hardcore JavaScript stuff that explains both the inner and outer workings of JavaScript and does so in more detail than any other book I've seen.
If (you want some disneyland typeof JavaScript){ you should check out the Visual Quickstart Guide's version, or something similar, and there you can learn JavaScript in a softer manner, and when you're ready for more, or are curious about the more fundamental aspects of the language, then this is the right book for that purpose. This book takes a very professional approach to JavaScript; treating it like a serious programming language, as opposed to silly toddler language, and it also deals with what JavaScript shares with other programming languages in terms of its syntax, impementation and purposes. And so you will eventually get a much more concrete idea of what JavaScript really is, how it works, the potentials and limitations it has, and so on. Again, this is JavaScript a la serious business, so if you're new to JavaScript, warm up elsewhere before getting your hands dirty with this one.
}
else
{David is a good author. He seems really dedicated to teaching you the darned language for real. But also writes in a dry manner. You have to be hellbent on learning JavaScript with this book at your disposal, otherwise it'll freak you out.
}
Customer Rating:
Summary: I Found Goodman's Work More Useful
Comment: If your use of Javascript is primarily for DHTML on web pages then get these other 2 O'Reilly books by Goodman first in this order -- "Javascript & DHTML Cookbook" and "Dynamic HTML The Definitive Reference". These books cover not only Javascript, but also style sheets, HTML, and browser object models that are needed to make javascript work in a web page environment.
The first book by Goodman is all examples, with explanations of concepts included within each example, with the examples in order of increasing complexity and building on previous examples. Extremely helpful in accomplishing real work on real web sites, much more than Flanagan's Javascript reference guide, especially since Flanagans guide has very few examples.
The second Goodman book is a condensed tutorial on DHTML concepts (Javascript, style sheets, the browser object model, and HTML) combined with reference sections on these subjects. Javascript is just a piece of the web page puzzle. The Goodman books put all the pieces together while Flanagan just covers Javascript.
If all you need is Javascript get Flanagan. If you need Javascript for working with web pages get Goodman. If I had to choose only one book for using Javascript on web pages I would choose Goodman's "Cookbook".
|
|
|
