Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: John Resig is brilliant and so is Pro JavaScript Techniques
Comment: Let me begin this review by mentioning, I've never had the desire to write a review for any of my 100+ owned technical literature pieces. John Resig's
Pro JavaScript Techniques (Pro) has inspired me to login and give three thumbs up for this phenomenal book.
Getting into John Resig's brain, author of the innovative library jQuery (www.jquery.com), has been nothing short of an exciting ride. The author makes Object Orientated JavaScript surprisingly simple to understand, as well as thorough understanding of the DOM, Events models, Ajax and many other contemporary styles of JavaScript as its written by professionals today.
I no longer reference any of my other JavaScript books. Instead opening up John's piece proves valuable over and over when in need of a refresher or a utility function for my web applications.
For any web developer who's serious about writing clean, powerful, unobtrusive JavaScript code -- look no further than John Resig's Pro JavaScript Techniques.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Not bad, but some annoying points.
Comment: This book is not too bad as far as it goes, but the layout of the book does not lead to a natural understanding of the subject matter. This book is a nice adjunct to more comprehensive works.
One very annoying point is the way the author continually uses the phrase "A couple ..." as in "A couple things". The phrae is "A couple OF things" not a "A couple things". I know this is a small thing, but it is repeated over an over in this book, and it becomes quite annoying.
I would still recommend this book, but please fix your idiomatic expressions in future works.
Customer Rating:
Summary: very well written
Comment: This book will surely take your javascript skills to the next level. Every chapter is worth reading.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Good Book
Comment: A decent book. If you have all the basics of javascript down and want to expand on that knowledge this a good selection. I found the sections on unobtrusive javascript very good. The most complex part of a javascript application can be witting it so that it work in all browsers. This can force one to write a ton of code just to deal with different browser implementations. I found Dean Edwards event loader to be an awesome piece of code which I believe I will use regularly in the future.
I did find a few errors in the code printed in the book. On page 231 the ajax function should read:
window.onload = function(){
ajax({
url: "scores.html",
type:"POST", /*this is listed as html in the book which is wrong*/
....
I saw a few little mistakes like this in the code in the book which indicates that it was rushed a bit. Obviously the author knows his stuff. Overall good book.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Be a Pro JavaScripter in no time!!!
Comment: In the days of Ajax, a good understanding of JavaScript is crucial in really understanding how Ajax works. This book by John Resig (developer of JQuery) has written an intermediate - advanced book on JavaScript teaching the reader topics such as object-oriented practices, creating reusable code, DOM, events along with many useable examples. With all the fancy JavaScript libraries out now, it is good to have a book that teaches the reader how to create your own libraries or at least how many of those are create with proper object-based development.
Until Ajax came along (which brought about JS libraries), knowing how to create objects and reusable code wasn't really explained much in books. This book talks about it in the first chapter, where John shows how to create objects via Prototyping, function overloading and using the Object constructor. John also talks about closures, scope, property and method creation and namespacing. All of these topics are found in other languages (C++, Java, VB.NET), but were not really used much in JavaScript until recently. John also covers in detail inheritance (classical and prototypal) and goes through other libraries (YUI, Dojo, Prototype, etc) and how they are created. A very thorough explanation on objects and creating reusable code in JavaScript. Actually this is one of the few books that have covered these topics in such detail. Many other books just skimmed the surface with these topics that made it hard for the newbie to understand.
What current JavaScript book could be published without talking about the DOM. Every book nowadays talks about this topic since everything out on the web seems to use it in on form or another. This book goes in to great detail talking about the DOM with a complete explanation of the basics of what it is, when it can be accessed (waiting for the DOM to load), finding elements on a page, standard DOM methods and 3rd party functions that have been used for years to fill in the gaps of DOM methods that are not available. For instance: addEvent, getElementsByClassName, CSSQuery, JQuery and others. Without a solid foundation of the DOM, many of the cool things that are done on the web today could not be done.
Another important and often not talked about topic is event registration. Chapter 6 of this book goes into the various ways and element can respond to an event. From event phases, (capturing and bubbling), traditional event binding (DOM Level 1) to W3C DOM Binding. This can be a very difficult topic to understand since there are a few differences between the way IE and other browsers handle it. But John explains each difference in great detail and makes you fully aware of how to handle it with some nice examples.
John also covers creating unobtrusive scripts which doesn't assume that JavaScript will be available in the user's browser and how to handle this scenario. This also ties in to separating the three layers (Presentation, Structure and Behavior) which is also discussed. This teaches the user how to keep your inline JS event handling out of the HTML and in a separate .JS file. This makes updating your code easier and less problematic in the future.
The rest of the book focuses on using JavaScript with CSS and applying the previous techniques covered in useful examples such as form validation, creating a dynamic image gallery and some simple Ajax examples.
This is a great book if you know the basics of JavaScript and want to take your skills to the next level and especially if you're not a "true" programming and need a little more explanation. A great book!
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