Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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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.

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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As someone else points out here, there are techniques described in this book that are so outdated that they are both detrimental to your skills as a developer and maybe even damaging to the quality of your product.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.

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!

This book seems to be written for someone almost entirely new to programming/scripting. A good deal of the concepts are explained just as thoroughly as they need to be for him to cover the subject he is covering.

As such, I would not recommend this book for someone already experienced in programming/scripting.

In response to some other posts, which criticize him for teaching document.write instead of the more modern approach (working directly with the DOM), I disagree. I do acknowledge that it is better to work directly with the DOM, but that is far from a concept that can be taught to someone completely new to programming/scripting without boggling their mind.

Also: BEWARE THE ERRORS! This book is chock full of errors in the code snippets they display. The error in the numbered snippet on page 36, probably the 3rd or 4th error I've seen so far, is what actually motivated me to write this review. That in mind, if you're paying attention, the errors can actually be turned to an educational purpose--debugging! :)

Final advice: If you're completely new to this field or want to treat yourself as if you're completely new, then get this book. I would not recommend sticking solely with this book, though. Get this book and some others (JavaScript: The Definitive Guide and probably another instructional book such as one of the WROX Javascript books).

I've been reviewing quite a few books recently to use in my JavaScript course that I teach. Finally, I've found a book that explains all the important concepts and does it in a way that's a breeze to understand.

The author has a friendly, relaxing "voice" that puts you right at ease, even with the most challenging concepts.

If you are wanting to learn JavaScript, I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

There are two ways to learn a language like Javascript. You can take lessons in Javascript (either in a classroom or from a book) or you can teach yourself by viewing other people's scripts and experimenting. If you use the first method then you learn how to write correct and efficient code. If you use the second method then you learn how to write code that does what you need but which isn't necessarily either the best way to do it or even the right way.

There is no real problem with either of these methods where you are just looking to get javascript to work on your web pages. The problem comes when someone who has learned Javascript using the second method decides to write a book on Javascript and "The Book of Javascript" is one such result. This book is just full of poor and outdated coding techniques such as:

- Surrounding all your inline Javascript inside HTML comments that will hide your script from Netscape 1, IE 1 and 2, modern systems using a database to generate your web pages, and web pages served as XHTML
- Doesn't understand the difference between local and global variables
- Uses the deprecated getYear() method instead of the Y2K compliant getFullYear()
- Doesn't understand the effect of returning true or false from code attached to an event handler
- Assumes you need DIVs added to your page to be able to use getElementById instead of just identifying the existing tags
- Uses wrong capitalization in event handlers in HTML and ignores event listeners completely
- Uses A HREF="#" where SPAN would be more appropriate
- DOM processing shows order where items are added one at a time instead of building the whole thing and adding it all at once
- Ajax code in the wrong order for IE7 so that IE7 ends up using the older less efficient method of sending to the server
- Lots of window processing examples that are blocked by modern browsers

Note that I have only rated this with one star on Amazon because Amazon will not allow me to rate it the zero stars this book deserves.

Not a well written book. It has much content but arranged kind of random. Not interesting enough to read cover to cover. Author from[...]
CSS: The Missing Manual

I looked at this book, the Visual QuickStart Book (Negrino/Smith), and the Dummies book (Vander Veer). I also looked at a couple of other basic books. This is by the far the best. This one will get you up and running doing some basic, though nifty, Javascript tasks. And it is very well written.

It was better organized than the Dummies book, and much more clear than the Visual Quickstart Guide. It was also more advanced than books like 'Javascript Demystified' or the Sam's Teach Yourself. The only bad thing I could say about the book is that it is a bit wordy at points.

If you need to do more advanced stuff, you can get one of the more advanced books.

As someone who learned JavaScript from the first edition of this book, I was excited see what Thau! had in store for the second edition. He did not disappoint! Once again, he explains the most complicated concept clearly, and makes programming a breeze. The new reference section is especially useful. Thanks, Thau!!

In his second go-around with The Book Of JavaScript, Dave Thau has knocked another one out of the park. The first book, published in January of 2000, while an incredibly good book, was showing its age. To say a lot has happened in the past seven years with regard to web development techniques would be an understatement. This book was long overdue.

What I like about this book is that every topic is well written and covered in-depth. For example, in chapter seven, Thau explains about working with forms. He takes you from writing HTML forms, reading from the forms, writing to forms and triggering events from form elements. He goes into the use of the keyword "this" as well as using the "id" attribute and retrieving it using the JavaScript function getElementByID(). Each topic addressed and built upon in a logical progression.

I find that this book is a very easy read. It is easy to understand and use. If you are new to JavaScript, if you want to refresh skills, The Book Of JavaScript is a great place to get you up to speed.