Customer Rating: 
Summary: Worth every penny!
Comment: I think that this book is great. I'm not a programmer -- I'm a designer -- and this book has been at my side since I bought it. This guy knows his stuff.
Customer Rating:
Summary: JavaScript Bridge
Comment: This book worked for me, and I think I know why. First of all, anyone who writes book on JavaScript takes a huge risk. Either the author tries to say everything and gets tangled up, or it's a gimmick book. This book is neither. The author tries to stick to the EMCA standards, which I believe is laudable. If the browsers did the same thing, we'd all be better off. So no matter who writes such a book, something is going to be left out, and this book leaves out the browser-idiosyncratic nonsense and sticks to the standards.Second, the book bridges HTML with the back end. As a designer, I get clients who want something done with the forms in HTML. JavaScript can handle a lot of the variable manipulation through forms, but let's face it, until it links up to a database, you've got bupkis. This book bridges that gap with several middleware examples, and introduced me (thankfully) to PHP. The book has enough for me to get something that actually works with a database and middleware. I went out and bought a book on PHP and MySQL (as the author recommends), but this book gave me a working start on middleware and using databases, and I know of no other JavaScript book that does this. Also, I plunked down the princely sum of about [...] for a hosting service with PHP and MySQL. All of the software for PHP/MySQL/Apache Server is free, but use a hosting service to learn how to use it. As far as the readability, it's clear as a bell, but it does go from the simple to the complex as the material gets more complex. I downloaded the sample chapter from www.newriders.com before I bought the book. It tackles JavaScript 1.5 so it's up to date, and I liked the example glossary. It's the kind of book (for me at least) that you read what you need and then look up stuff in. I feel I got a complete JavaScript book with the added bonus of the middleware/back-end.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Too disjointed to be a solid grounding.
Comment: I liked the idea behind what Bill was trying to do - a different spin on JavaScript learning, and for the most part I thought the example code was instructionally relevant.He makes many surprising assumptions about what you already know, and the volume of facts that you are capable of absorbing non-sequentially. There are a lot of informational gaps to fill in yourself, so be prepared to put two and two together. I found myself having to read and re-read many paragraphs multiple times to figure out what he was saying. The overall flow didn't seem smooth, making for a tough read at times. There are 406 pages of book, only the first 272 of which can be considered remotely JavaScript-focused. The rest of the chapters digress into half-measure discussions of PHP/MySQL, ASP/VBScript, CGI/PERL, XML, Flash/ActionScript, Java, ColdFusion, and ASP.NET. This might be good as a light introduction for anyone marginally interested in any of these, but he so intermittantly crams a variety of non-expert discussion into so few pages that this only provided me with a few extra chunks of information.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Nice Shot.....Wrong Target
Comment: With short scripts cunningly contrived for the best pedagogical mileage, this is an excellent book for the serious Web scripting beginner.Yet this book, "written with the designer in mind," will surely leave most Web site workers unsatisfied. You are sufficiently warned early on when the author acknowledges that he prefers to use a simple text editor rather than the productivity tools (Homesite, BBEdit, Dreamweaver) experienced Web designers must use to construct sites with the speed, quantity, and accuracy necessary in their jobs. The scripts resemble transcriptions from a professor's lecture notes. These are not lively, practical examples that you can modify immediately to enrich site usability by presenting the maximum amount of information and interactivity with minimum navigation. That weakness is highlighted in Ch. 18 when the author dramatically warms to the subject of Flash ActionScript. The pulse of real world situations beats strongly in this chapter and I wish the other chapters had the same immediacy. The last one-third of the book is dominated by server-side scripting. If you don't have your own server or do not know how to set one up, you won't be able to follow along. I believe this is a serious failing in a book clearly directed at the "front-end" worker. And if you are as old as I am, you will find the editor's decision to use a tiny, red font for the most important lines of code to be a bit painful.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Just what I needed
Comment: I'm not a programmer, and while I've done a good deal of work with HTML and Web design (mainly with Dreamweaver), learning JavaScript is my first venture into programming. The book starts off with some simple and not so simple examples. The not-so-simple examples are practical tools that I could actually do something with (a decimal to hexadecimal conversion script so I can take decimal RBG values and have them automatically translated into a six-character color hexadecimal value.) After the introductory chapter the book gets down to business with what you have to know to work effectively with JavaScript. The writing is clear and it explains how things work. Nothing is dumbed down and nothing is left out. However, it doesn't talk in the engineering language of some programming books I looked at.The explanations are clear and most are accompanied by examples embedded in HTML. It's a two-color book, and the JavaScript stands out in the second color (red) so that it's easy to see where the JavaScript is in the HTML. All of the examples work, and while I'm putting off the chapters on the back-end (PHP, CGI, etc) I hope to learn how to use the backend eventually with JavaScript. It's the kind of book I can look up what I need easily. The example glossary in the back is very simple to follow, and each of the JavaScript terms has an example of how the code looks. New Riders and the author have all of the book's scripts on their Web pages and I downloaded them to save some typing. This is the kind of book I wish more publishers would print. It's not overly simplified, but it is clear and easy to follow. At the same time it is definitly complete so that I don't have to go out and buy another JavaScript book as soon as I'm finished with this one. This is a keeper and I'm very happy with it.
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