The Book of JavaScript, 2nd Edition: A Practical Guide to Interactive Web Pages [Paperback]

Dave Thau! (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1593271069 | ISBN-13: 978-1593271060 | Publication Date: December 15, 2006 | Edition: Second Edition

The Book of JavaScript teaches readers how to add interactivity, animation, and other tricks to their web sites with JavaScript. Rather than provide a series of cut-and-paste scripts, thau! takes the reader through a series of real world JavaScript code with an emphasis on understanding. Each chapter focuses on a few important JavaScript features, shows how professional web sites incorporate them, and takes readers through examples of how they might add those features to their own web sites. This thoroughly updated 2nd edition includes new chapters on Ajax, revised appendices, and new examples throughout. Summary sections and assignments close each chapter, making the book perfect for use in college courses or independent study.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

With JavaScript, you can add interactivity, animation, and other tricks to your web pages quickly. But this isn't just a book of scripts for you to cut and paste into your HTML, only to find out later that nothing works as you'd expected. Using real-world examples as the starting point, author thau! walks you step by step through various scripts and explains how they produce the effects you want.

Because no discussion of JavaScript today is complete without coverage of Ajax, this thoroughly updated second edition includes new chapters on Ajax, so you can get up to speed with this valuable method for creating truly dynamic web pages. This second edition of the best-selling The Book of JavaScript also features revised appendices and new examples throughout to reflect today's web environment. Inside, you'll learn to:

* Work with frames, forms, cookies, and alarms
* Use events to react to a user's actions
* Perform image swaps and rollovers
* Program your own functions to produce customized solutions
* Store user preferences and build a shopping cart
* Use Dynamic HTML to turn web pages into multimedia applications

If you need to spruce up tired-looking pages, The Book of JavaScript, 2nd Edition will help take your site from bland to brilliant.

BONUS: Includes a complete reference to all JavaScript objects and functions, including examples, properties, methods, handlers, and browser compatibility!

About the Author

Thau! has been creating Internet applications since 1993, starting with bianca.com, the first web-based community on the Internet. He was Director of Software Engineering and Senior Scientist at Wired Digital, and has taught programming languages to hundreds of artists, engineers, and children. He is currently creating data sharing platforms for people studying biodiversity and working towards a PhD degree in computer science at UC Davis.

Product Details

• Paperback: 528 pages
• Publisher: No Starch Press; Second Edition edition (December 15, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1593271069
• ISBN-13: 978-1593271060
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #625,136 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Dave Thau has taught countless thousands of people JavaScript via the Book of JavaScript, his Webmonkey tutorials, and in numerous courses and conference presentations. He also likes ants.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars New book, old stuff, March 8, 2007

By 

Brett Merkey (Palm Harbor, FL United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Book of JavaScript, 2nd Edition: A Practical Guide to Interactive Web Pages (Paperback)

§
I use the word "stuff" since this appears to be the author's favorite combining word for variable names. This is not a bad book but it is a re-working of old approaches. Much of the code relies on poor structural HTML. If you are coding Web pages in a modern way then many scripts in the book will not apply.

Two examples should suffice to communicate the age of this material to those with some experience with modern coding:
1) Constant use of the comment trick to "hide from older browsers" which no longer exist in fact. Try using this trick with XHTML and see what happens...

2) Constant use of "document.write". Anyone using that nowadays for routine transformations of the page is severely limiting those possibilities.

There are better books out there. See my other reviews for some good ones.

§

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Avoid completely, April 26, 2007

By 

Andrew Otwell "heyotwell" (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Book of JavaScript, 2nd Edition: A Practical Guide to Interactive Web Pages (Paperback)

Although Thau! has a cool name, including that exclamation mark, I can't recommend this book at all.

As someone else points out here, there are techniques described in this book that are so outdated that they are both detrimental to your skills as a developer and maybe even damaging to the quality of your product. Slapping an "Ajax" chapter on at the end is not good enough to release a 2nd edition. Some of Thau's techniques, like using "document.write" haven't been acceptable for several years now. There's no coverage of web standards or HTML validation, the cornerstones of contemporary web development. The author's own book site is like a relic from 1999 with stupid Javascript tricks like a timer telling you "you've been on this website for 23 seconds." That's just embarrassing.

Luckily, there are many many excellent books on Javascript that do teach good practices. The best of these includes books like Jeremy Keith's DOM Scripting: Web Design with JavaScript and the Document Object Model. Christian Heilman's Beginning JavaScript with DOM Scripting and Ajax: From Novice to Professional (Beginning: from Novice to Professional) is also very good.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best book on JavaScript out there, January 8, 2007

By 

Lenore Mohammadian (San Diego, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Book of JavaScript, 2nd Edition: A Practical Guide to Interactive Web Pages (Paperback)

Thau did it again! The second edition is even better than the first:
all the good real world examples, tips for giving fussy browsers "what
they want," a really handy reference, plus over a hundred new pages on
AJAX--Asynchronous JavaScript and XML--all the rage these days, it
seems, and the "magic" behind Google maps and the photo-sharing
interface of Flickr.

I felt great satisfaction when I wrote my first AJAX application--a
shared to do list--with the help of this book. I got up and running in
almost no time. I appreciated all the extras, too, like how to set up
a webserver and PHP.

The book is beautifully laid out and easy to use. Each chapter begins
with a set of bullet points that succinctly summarize the content
covered. The material is also presented in a logical way, so that I
always had the background I needed when new concepts were introduced
(or I could easily thumb back and refresh my memory). I highly
recommend The Book of Javascript, take 2!