Customer Reviews

DHTML Utopia Modern Web Design Using JavaScript & DOM

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

In the past year I have seen some impressive yet close to incomprehensible scripts that show a new direction in JavaScript. We can find syntax and approaches so different from the standard practice most of us implement. Unfortunately, the scripters who have grasped the new techniques have shown little interest in explaining the new approach. Their examples published on the Web have a "show-offy" character that do little to communicate or proselytize.

For that reason, I was eager to study this book since it promised to deal with some of the new approaches, including the syntax. I have learned a lot from the author who early on made pains to keep me running apace. Regretfully, the author seemed to be less and less concerned with keeping me with him as the book progressed. The first 4 chapters were the clearest.

Part of the problem was mine. Since the book did not seem to be organized in a linear fashion, I skipped Ch. 5 on animation. I design Web applications so I associate animation with script kiddies and popup ad makers. Ch. 6, on form validation, was up my alley but following the author was painful because he kept referring to a variable "fV" that was defined with a self-referential, bizarrely nested syntax. Only at the end of the chapter did he mention that Ch. 5 first used this syntax. I had to go back to the previous chapter to get a clue. But only a clue because that chapter never really tried to explain why this extremely unconventional approach was used.

The author early on tries to make the case that his approach is better than the conventional one. I *think* I agree but as the chapters progressed, he made less and less effort to prove anything at all. I was very disappointed in this. I also did not like the odd way the braces in the scripts were handled. Because he did not line them up well, it was difficult to tell when a section of a script began or ended. The author recognized this in some cases by putting in comments:
} /* end 'if' */
} /* end 'for' */
It would have been better to match braces visibly. Yes, code alignment is a matter of taste so I cannot really hold that against him.

Some examples did not work quite as advertised. The type-ahead dropdown script did not work at all in Windows Firefox and worked only erratically in IE.

I liked the way the author oriented his examples to user-centered design. Ultimately, the key to the best implementations of JavaScripting is not the syntactical approach but how the functionality fits into the usability of what you are doing.

This is without doubt the worst book on DHTML/Javascript that I've ever read. The author tries to be cute, funny and authorative but ends up just plain painful. The examples are over-long and artificial, and would be difficult to incorporate into a real world application. The author peppers the book with snazzy shots like "It's the modern way!" but rarely explains the benefits of the methodology he's pushing, and glosses over any shortcomings.
For instance, in discussing regular expressions he provides a simple expression for a telephone number, then points out that it's seriously flawed. But it's "suitable for our discussion" so onward we press, and a correct solution is never provided. Bad luck if you were after such a beast. (Footnotes abound - often just URLs to now broken links - so you have to wonder why he couldn't have provided the solution at the bottom of the page.) The part on Ajax is a joke - he just plugs in an out-of-date version of the Sarissa library and never scratches below the surface.
Beware.

There is some great cutting edge stuff in here. If you know what you are doing already and want to get a jump start into Ajax then this is a good book for you. My problem with it is that the text relies too heavily on the code to convey the message. Which means that the book is better for advanced readers. I also would have appreciated some more emphasis on what works cross browser and how to handle older browsers.

Like a lot of the other reviewers, I found the first few chapters the most helpful. If you are willing to completely ignore non-DOM compliant browsers (which we should all be migrating to anyway) then there are some cool techniques that you can learn here.

The only bit I don't like about this book is that you often get yourself into something without really learning much about it. If you've never been exposed to regular expressions before, then you might find it difficult to adapt his cool rollover techniques to other uses... for example using regular expressions to dynamically change the className of a div tag, for example.

Same thing with objects. After he introduces them, he doesn't do to much to explain to you how to use them to your full advantage. He gives you a quick overview and you say to yourself "this is cool stuff", but it would be hard if you've never been exposed to objects in javascript to adapt this knowlege towards other applications within javascript.

The book isn't tremendously long, and so part of the reason for all this might be the target length of the book. Nonetheless, he throws you a bone with a bit of gravy, but if you're trying to find the steak, you're outta luck.

BUT! If you can grasp onto the concepts, then this book is a definate eye opener. I have been able to leverage his examples in many pages at my work thus easing my overall programming burdon. I have found that many of his scripts take a bit of set up to get working, but they all fulfill the promise that after you get them up and running you can geniunely plop them onto any other page and they will work. Pretty cool stuff.

Michael Bodily
Mission Viejo, CA

It's refreshing to finally see similar books hitting the market. There is a strong need to cover a modern approach to JavaScript programming, many old hacks aren't required anymore and this book showcase a good amount of up to date techniques. The whole book is 100% practical oriented and assume previous experience with client-side webdeveloping. Organization among the chapters is somewhat lacking but the examples are usually quite easy to follow. I especially appreciated how the author try to follow standards as much as possible, but he keeps a pragmatic attitude when the need arise.

(this was originally published on www.last-child.com)

This is a difficult book to read for non-javascript programmers. If you are more comfortable with HTML and CSS, I'd recommend reading Jeremy Keith's DOM Scripting first. Keith explains the theories behind this book.

That said, I did learn enough from DHTML Utopia to not look like a complete idiot during my job interview with Yahoo. This book is filled with project examples for you to follow along with. I will say that I tried several of the examples and had mixed results. I visited the book's web site to get updated code.

If you've already worked with Javascript, this is a great book to have on the shelf. If you are a rookie, start with Jeremy Keith and follow up with DHTML Utopia.

I got this book looking to find more coverage on how dhtml/ajax works. I got a book very light on details and focused on very broad how-to/cut-and-paste type scripts. So, partly, it was my own fault for not reading the back closely enough - it was never meant for deep coverage.

Even given the premise of the book, it is very light on content. As another reader points out, wide margins and big fonts take up a lot of space. Also, he inists on repeatedly putting the same functions in every example - rather than pointing readers to a website with full source as almost every other book does.

There were a few interesting ideas in the book, which was it's saving grace. But the organization of the book was the give away, he claims that you can read chapters in any order. His coverage is so high level that there's no buildup of knowledge, even for his target audience of novice programmers. How can that be, you ask? The explanatations of how things work were very broad and offered no insight to how to use things outside the scope. A book like this, should have been a cheap tiny book, maybe that came with a cd, for ready to use scripts.

If you're looking for something one step above copy and paste, to garner some basic understanding of what you're doing, this book may be for you. For anyone with javascript experience looking for something more meaningful this book is definitely not for you. For anyone beginning in javascript looking to actually be able to program on your own, this book is not for you. Zakas' wrox book was much more in depth even for topics that his book doesn't profess to cover like CSS.

Stuart Langridge's survey of modern scripting techniques is very worthwhile for those who've dabbled in object-oriented JavaScript programming but who have clung to approaches learned years ago. The focus is on the DOM supported in the current generation of browsers -- or rather, on the various DOMs; Langridge is very good at explaining the differences among them and providing work-arounds. His scripts work well where they can work, and fail gracefully where they can't.

I was hoping the book would cover AJAX to a greater degree than it does; this material is essentially confined to chapter 8 and isn't well-integrated with the core material. However, AJAX is still relatively new, and I imagine that if there's a second edition this material will be expanded.

Books of this type and length all suffer from a similar drawback, which is that only a single line of attack can be explored and developed in depth. Thus the same general approach is followed throughout, and the same libraries used for almost all the examples. So the book will not serve as a comprehensive survey; it's best for those who have already developed alternate approaches.

As others have mentioned, there is a somewhat large jump in difficulty between chapters 4 and 5, but it's not as large as in some books of this type. (Even in other O'Reilly books, one finds three or four chapters of baby steps, and then an inadequately-explained quantum leap to a new conceptual level. Langridge does handle this better than most.)

In sum, I recommend this book to the experienced JavaScript programmer who wants to come to terms with modern techniques that will allow for more powerful programming in current and future browsers.

Overall I like Stuart Langrdige's book "DHTML Utopia Modern Web Design Using JavaScript & DOM". I like the updated examples of how to use Javascript in a modern browser for today's web developer, and I like all the focus on setting up events and the repeated explanation why they are so important/handy. I like these aspects, but while he does some things right, other things are really wrong.

While Mr. Langridge strives to give us modern examples of how to use Javascript in our web pages in the modern day, most of the time it feels like this book is just a whole mash of code examples all squished together. Pictures seem to be relatively few and far between, so instead of reading a great teaching manual/tool, it feels many times more like a reference pamphlet. Now this isn't always a bad thing, but when I pick up a sitepoint book, I expect to find it a bit easier to read (see "The CSS Anthology" by Rachel Andrew) and have it be smoother through the use of more pictures to explain points throughout the learning process.

I feel that "DHTML Utopia" is a worthwhile read for web developers, but I just wished that more pages had been allocated to make the text feel not so squished and more images had been used so that the reader could follow step by step where the author was going, instead of having to keep what we were learning cached in memory, finally getting a picture after turning a # of pages.

All in all, a useful read, but I feel it could have been even better.

**** RECOMMENDED

Published in May 2005, this is one of the latest books with more up-to-date information on writing accessible scripts using JavaScript, CSS, and the DOM. It even delves into remote scripting, XMLHTTP, AJAX, XML-RPC, XPath, and parsing RSS feeds.

All the code is well documented and can be downloaded from their site, if you know the word to look up in the book.

Browser differences are well-documented, including Safari and Gecko-based browsers.

For older coders, the book details how to move function calls out of HTML elements and into event targets and event listeners, as a better way to handle DOM events.

Also mentioned are techniques such as specifying anonymous functions, using object literals to keep the DHTML encapsulated, coordinating client-side and server-side form validation, enhancing the use of large drop-down lists, timed listeners, delegation.

Some of this was way over my head, but the method of instruction really helped me improve my coding techniques.