Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: DOM for Dummies
Comment: First off, this book is not targeted to me specifically. It's evident that it is written for non-programmers who want to start building web pages with more interactivity. I, on the other hand, have a lot of experience programming with many different languages including JavaScript. The one thing I always had trouble understanding is the DOM.
Understanding the DOM is separate than knowing how to program. I believe that is the central point you should understand about this book. The book will not teach you Javascript (although it does provide some great examples). It will teach you how to think about the DOM because without this understanding, you're just blindly copying-and-pasting javascript code onto pages.
Jeremy Keith takes you step-by-step through real-world examples and in each example he shows you the conventional way to do them. Then he shows you a better way, and proceeds to explain why.
The book is a very quick read; I read it in one night. I did get to skip over some of the introductory chapters which talked a little about syntax and the differences between IFs, WHILEs, and FORs. However, I wish I had this book when it first came out almost two years ago. That's a lot of time to write plenty of bad Javascript - and I've done plenty.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great Javascript book, great coding book
Comment: This book is easily the best introductory coding book I've used. Not only does it take you from elementary javascript to some really practical applications of javascript for your websites, it also gives you a strong methodology for tackling problems you want to solve with javascript. It really touches on some good basic fundamentals of coding in general. Also, unlike some of the people pumping out web design books these days, Jeremy Keith writes clearly and explains things very logically. I hope he writes another soon!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Turns you into a JavaScript surgeon
Comment: JavaScript is like a scalpel--in the wrong hands, it can lead to disaster; in the hands of a skilled surgeon, it is a powerful tool. In Jeremy Keith's DOM Scripting, the guiding principle throughout is to turn you into that surgeon. The book opens by putting JavaScript into historical perspective, then follows that with the basics of the JavaScript language and the Document Object Model (DOM). From those basics, Keith layers and weaves best practices such as standards support, progressive enhancement, graceful degradation, and accessibility, all while slowly building components that reach a final crescendo in a complete website example. (Here's a hint: if your web pages have any in-line JavaScript code or handlers such as , you're doing things wrong.) If you're looking for in-depth Ajax material here, look elsewhere. This book is all about doing JavaScript correctly--so you won't cut yourself later.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Dynamite Book!!!
Comment: This is one of the best computer books I have ever bought. The author teaches an invaluable method of separating content, presentation and behavior in web documents. The key benefits are graceful degradation and ease of maintenance. He ends the book with a new method called AJAX, that's used to make web pages more interactive. His teaching style is first class for people who might not like to program. He presents a problem, offers increasingly better solutions and at the end of each chapter he gives a short review. Easy reading.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Excellent Intro to Standards-based DOM Scripting
Comment: Having a bit of knowledge of javascript, but not knowing exactly how to integrate DHTML without breaking the site -- this book offers a simplistic approach to convey the techniques used and recommended by accessibility professionals and the W3C.
The only drawback after having started to work with DOM Scripting on the job is that I need more complex examples.
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