Customer Rating: 
Summary: Excellent resource on JavaScript
Comment: Recently I borrowed this book from a friend, and ended up buying it. As a professional web designer, I was more than delighted to have additional resources from which to create web sites, both clients' and my own. As I learned, JavaScript has capabilities far outstretching those of HTML, such as replacing CGI forms, creating popup windows, image swapping and making the page's background fade from one color to another on entry to a page, yet is much easier to write than Sun's Java. It can be embedded into HTML documents, consequently saving time loading, compiling, and writing. JavaScript is an amazing scripting language, and though I hope to learn actual Java later, this book has proved an excellent resource in learning JavaScript and adding dynamic content to web sites I have created.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The Only Book We Can't Keep Around The Office
Comment: We have now burned through eight copies of David Flanagan's book. Everyone wants to take it to their house -- where it generally stays.It's an incredibly useful book: comprehensive, accurate and concise. It does lack a "cookbook/how-to" section, but I don't see that as a major failing. In any case, I believe that the best javascript "how to" repositories are on-line -- the right place for a "how-to" center, since the state of the art progresses much more quickly than a book can be updated. (Anyone remember the days when you just relied on the Navigator object to do browser checks?) If you want my advice, don't just get one copy of this book -- get one for the office and one for home. That's what I did.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Good, but not for the beginner
Comment: This book is a very well written book and it does cover a lot of material, but it isn't the greatest book for the beginner starting out with no knowledge of programming. Yes, they say Javascript isn't really programming, but it does a world of help to be familiar with programming to understand this book. There aren't as many examples to fully understand the concepts and I thought some of the explanations were a little vague. This would be a good book to use in conjunction with another book.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Too much text!
Comment: Perhaps this book *does* define every last aspect of JavaScript, but for the novice programmer, or someone who just wants to get started and write simple scripts, this book is heavy going. Chapter after chapter of detailed (and sometimes over-complicated) English explanantions would be more interesting with visual examples (like the Visual Quickstart guides, for example). We're all trying to produce code for a fun visual environment, but with its lack of supporting visual examples and lack of code examples, this book just didn't make me feel interested.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The best Javascript reference
Comment: This is the best Javascript reference available.The book is divided into three sections. The first covers "Core Javascript", defining the language itself with only occasional references to how you might use it in a browser. This initially seemed to me to be a roundabout way to approach the language--why wouldn't you want to explain it by examples in a web page? However, after becoming more familiar with the language I think it was absolutely the right decision, since it avoids confusing the document object model (see below for more about that) with the language itself, a confusion common among beginners. At the end of the first section (which developers experienced in other languages can skim, but shouldn't skip) you know what Javascript code looks like and how to do assignments, define functions, and so on. The second section, "Client-side Javascript", is where examples start to show up that you can really run in a test page of your own. The examples are good and there are plenty of them. The heart of the second section is the discussion of the document object model. After some introductory discussion, covering windows and frames and some of the more common Javascript tasks, there's an overview of the DOM. Subsequent chapters cover it in more detail. This organization makes it pretty easy to find what you need without even resorting to the index. For example, I find the forms chapter, and the chapter on how to use cookies to save state, to be very useful, and easy to find information in. Finally, there's a reference section at the back. This is the most valuable section once you're well on your way with the language, and is what I now use most of all. It's comprehensive and clearly written. The book does have one weakness, which has been noted by other reviewers here: it doesn't have a "cookbook" section, showing you how to do common tasks with Javascript. This is a serious omission because of the nature of Javascript usage. Very often a webmaster for a small non-profit or a small business will decide they want to do a rollover, or add an alert for form validation failures, or something similar. Users like this need something equivalent to the "Perl Cookbook"; a "How to . . ." section that gives you an example close to what you need. Despite this caveat, however, this is still the best book around: an excellent reference, and a great way to learn the language.
|
|
