Customer Reviews

The Book of JavaScript: A Practical Guide to Interactive Web Pages

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This book goes well beyond the typical "how-to" JavaScript book. After spending the first few pages explaining the history and basics of the language, David Thau mixes up the tutorials with real life JavaScript examples from sites like Sun, HotMail, and Pets.com. He carefully walks through all the code and explains everything. Thau is a great writer. I remember him from his days at WebMonkey.com and his JavaScript tutorials from that site taught me and I'm sure many others how to script. As he did with the online tutorials, this book does a thorough job covering all the basics like variables, strings, arrays, functions, etc. On the downside, there is nothing here for the advanced JavaScripter (check out O'Reilly's JavaScript Cookbook for that), but if you are a beginner or even an intermediate JavaScripter, this book is an excellent choice, and does a much better job teaching JavaScript than other entry level books, like "Teach Yourself JavaScript 1.3 in 24 Hours" or "JavaScript for Dummies."

Even though JavaScript is not a new technology (in term of the Internet world), it is often difficult to find well written books that are easy to understand about the subject. Those that are well written, good instructional books, tend to be poor reference books (with the ability to find answers without reading the whole chapter0.

"The Book of JavaScript..." does a good job at both. If you need the instructional "how-to" type of book you will find this book is excellent. Once you feel comfortable with JavaScript you will be able to use this book as a reference.

This book does a good job at combining both worlds. There are better books for instruction and better books for reference (JavaScript: The Definitive Guide O'Reilly Press), but as an all-in-one book this succeeds where others haven't.

Target Audience
Beginning JavaScript coders.

Contents
This is a conversational tutorial on JavaScript coding designed for people who have not used the language much (or at all).

The book is divided into the following chapters:

Welcome To JavaScript!; Using Variables and Built-in Functions to Update Your Web Pages Automatically; Give The Browsers What They Want; Rollovers: Everyone's Favorite JavaScript Trick; Opening and Manipulating Windows; Getting Functional: Writing Your Own JavaScript Functions; Giving and Taking Information With Forms; Keeping Track of Information with Arrays and Loops; Timing Events; Frames and Image Maps; Validating Forms, Massaging Strings, and Working with CGI; Cookies; Dynamic HTML; How to Fix Broken Code; Beyond the Browser: Plug-ins, ActiveX, Making Music, and Java; Reference to JavaScript Objects and Functions; Answers to Assignments

Review
There are numerous books on the market that deal with learning JavaScript. There is everything from simplistic guides to the person building their first web page, to in-depth guide for the professional web developers, to detailed reference guides that document every feature. On that scale of coverage, this book falls somewhere on the lower end of the scale. That's not a bad thing... It's just good to know what the target audience is.

The tone of the author's writing is conversational and a little quirky. He uses a number of examples in each chapter to illustrate the subject matter, and they illustrate the points well. Each example is dissected so that the reader can follow along and understand what each line is doing. By the time you are finished, you should have a solid understanding of the basics of JavaScript. At that point, you should be ready to pick up a more detailed book and start learning the intricacies of the language.

The only bad thing about the book at this point in time is the age of the book. He assumes that the reader is working with either Netscape 3.0 or Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0. On one hand, most of the stuff you see here should be supported now in any browser. On the other hand, there's something to be said for learning the latest information on more up-to-date platforms. The age also shows up when you examine some of their web site samples. Obviously, the sites have been updated since the book was written, so you can't very well follow along any more.

Conclusion
A solid, if somewhat dated, tutorial treatment of basic JavaScript coding. Easy to read, and very good explanations of code examples.

I recently became interested in learning JavaScript. The only practical experience with it came from using applications such as Adobe ImageReady to generate it for me.

I began by searching Webmonkey.com. I discovered their a awesome tutorial series written by Thau!. I completed these tutorials in 3 days and was hungry for more.

I discovered his book that weekend. The book reads very well and keeps you interested with real world examples.

If you are looking for a be all end all source on JavaScript buy an O'reily book. But, if you are looking for a good place to start, Thau!'s book is the one to buy.

Don't take my word for it, go to webmonkey.com and search for JavaScript tutorials and sample some of his work.

Thanks Thau!

This book is geared towards beginning programmers. In this regard, it's a great book and is good at teaching the basics of JavaScript. However, if you're an experienced programmer, you may want something more to the point. The author does a good job of talking about programming for various browsers and pitfalls to look out for, and will get you up to speed with JavaScript quickly.

Because this book is a tutorial, the author recommends picking up another JavaScript book for reference, and I agree. Read (or skim if you're not new to programming) through the book and do the exercises to get a feel for the language, then refer to a JavaScript reference book for more technical details and comprehensive information.

I've been wanting to improve my web pages and knew that JavaScript was the way to go, but I couldn't get my brain around it. I took a three hour seminar on JavaScript last year and came out of it completely confused. After reading the reviews of this book, I thought I'd give JavaScript another try.

From the first pages of the book, I knew I had made the right choice. David Thau has written a very informative tutorial for JavaScript novices like me. I am not "mega-geeky" so the informal and humorous tone makes it easy to read. The examples are clear and simple to follow. Though some of the example web pages he points the reader to have changed since the time of the book's printing, they are still available via the cd-rom included with the book.

This book is an excellent choice for anyone wanting to learn JavaScript!!

I have been trying to learn JavaScript for over 6 months now and the while I understand the basics the more advanced features are still a mystery to me. That was until I found the Book Of JavaScript.

Broken down to the beginner level and starting with a very basic introduction to JavaScript I found that I was able to understand the concepts as well as retain them. After the intro you move to functions such as the alert prompt. The author does a good job of making sure you understand before moving on.

You'll also cover topics like rollovers, manipulating windows and then begin to write your own functions. Also covered in the book is forms, arrays and loops as well as setting up timing events, frames, I mage maps, cookies and DHTML.

One thing I really liked about this book was the author's breakdown of how to fix broken code. After spending time working with the book I can now see why it sold over 20,000 in the first two months.

The cd-rom include has a demo of Dreamweaver 3.0, Adobe Go Live 4.0 and an assortment of other software. Overall this book is by far one of the best I have worked.

The first JavaScript book I purchased was Visual Quickstart by Negrino/Smith. I only purchased that because of the excellent experience I had with Elizabeth Castro's HTML book, also from Visual Quickstart. That JavaScript book turned out to be a cut-and-paste recipe book. As hard as I tried, I did not learn JavaScript. Frustrated, I searched for JavaScript book reviews in Amazon and came upon Thau's book. Having finished it, I can confidently say I can code simple JavaScript from scratch. His style is clear and helped me develop an understanding of the language.

The strength of the book comes from his patient handholding. He goes out of his way to explain the logic flow in the codes at the start of the book. Case in point was when he introduced "parameters" in "functions". He did so by illustrating the inefficiency of rewriting the same code all over and showed how the code evolved from one without a function, to one with a function and finally to one with a function and a parameter(s). The operative word here is "evolve". With that approach, the user learns to logically progress from a simple code to a more complex code.

However, he was not consistent is presenting all the ideas in that fashion. Later on in the book, he would simply present a complicated problem and then show the complicated codes...and then explain it. This is really not as effective as showing the evolution of the code because even though I understood his explanation, it did not provide a progressive logic stream. Knowing how a code works is different from being able to actually write that code if the logic flow is not clear.

I enjoyed the use of real-world examples in this book. I'm a java programmer who used a little bit of javascript at work but wanted to learn more about it. This is a good book for someone thinking about getting into programming. It introduces you to some basic programming practices (loops, variables, functions) while teaching you javascript. For this same reason, I would not recommend this book to a programmer.

Book of Javascript is more than a 'cookbook' of scripts for a web site; it tells how to effectively use JavaScript to add interactivity, animation and other fancy moves to a standard web page. Examples of how various scripts work teach readers how to use frames, cookies and others to create customized sites. A practical, surprisingly easy guide to use, even for relative novices.