Customer Reviews

JavaScript Bible

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

 

 

I have a few javascript books already, but they are out of date. I bought this book, which claims to be published in 2007, to learn to be more DOM and W3C compliant. However, from reading this book so far, I find that the material in it are as outdated as my older books. For example, the book still encourages the use of the "innerHTML" method, which is neither a W3C recommendation, nor is it encouraged anymore. Furthermore, the book shows you to convert a "number" type to a string by doing this:

var num = 100;
num = "" + num;

That's just silly. What happened to the toString() method? How about doing this?

var num = 100;
num = num.toString();

Also the book doesn't encourage separation of structure from functionality. The book's examples have javascript all mixed together with the markup. This is clearly not the modern, correct, and recommended way to script a web page.

So far, these are the gripes I have about this book... and I'm only on chapter 6. It makes me feel like I don't want to finish this book, because I might adopt these outdated methods of scripting.

I do not recommend this book.

books on changing technologies are always out of date by 6 months to a year (a book this size is probably closer to a year). i Google when i need the latest info, just like the rest of the planet apparently.

i understand other reviewer gripes about this book, but it is still the best printed resource available. the book weighs in at a hefty 35 chapters and 5 Appendices in about 1200 pages (and yes the print is small). i found the information well organized, with a decent layout and a useable contents and index. this book tries to serve both the novice and the professional, and frankly does a pretty good job. a book this size obviously has errors, but nothing i would categorize as lethal (it's not a cookbook but has some decent template scripts to get you going). no one could write a book this size and comprehensive from scratch, this book is clearly an evolution and uses "revised" content from previous editions. i got the feeling reading this book that the authors write real code for real world apps. i thought about docking a star because it is has so much information. i seem to have got conditioned over the years to have a slight sense of dread when i have to open a large book to look something up. However, IMHO, the real value is searchable CD version of the book, hence back to 5 stars. this has 23 Bonus chapters! yes that's 23 bonus chapters which add over 500 pages. a nice touch was having references to the CD version (marked with a BC prefix) in the index of the print edition.

from a purist point of view some of the recommendations are wrong, but from a pragmatic point of view no one is going to be impressed with your W3C compliant script that runs 10-20x slower than the non-compliant one (and that's not just in IE).

inevitably a little dated but still the most comprehensive javascript book available.

The content of this book is Excellent, the wait was worth it. I'm glad someone finally consolidated all the JavaScript information into a publication, which brings me to a criticism, not about the content. The print is too small. I believe it would have been better to turn this into a two book publication and make the print bigger (and blacker), the paper could also be whiter for better contrast and a heavier weight. Yes it would have been more expensive, but you wouldn't go blind trying to read it.

I seldom extol the virtues of computer technology books but I have to say that this book because of its clarity and content has been and continues to be, a delight to work with.

I am what you might call an 'old hand' in the industry and needed to adapt my skills to embrace browser based technology for the first time.

This book explains clearly how the DOM components work together and the relationship bwtween those components and the scripting language.

I will certainly be looking out for any other books that may have been written by the author.

I'm very new to javascript (though a long time programmer in other languages) and agree that there is some additional reference material and tutorials on common tasks that might have been included. If you're already quite familiar with object languages, this will probably not be a drawback. If you're not, you will still have to struggle with many of the scripts to figure out the precise nature of its syntax and how/why object concepts and methods are rendered as they are. It might also have included a little more line-by-line explanation of exactly what some of the code syntax is doing and why it is rendered as it is. That would have helped us beginners (and probably not bothered more advanced users- they could have just skipped that material.)

So, why did I give it only 1 star? Because the main drawback is entirely unnecessary and very frustrating. There are 23 "Bonus Chapters" that do not appear in the book, but only on the e-book pdf. The e-book is great for searching specific topics and items - and for usable samples in the first 31 chapters. But it is UNPRINTABLE and CANNOT BE COPIED. This is especially troublesome for the 23 bonus chapters which do not appear in the book. Indeed, most of the practical applications are demonstrated in these chapters. The pdf permissions don't allow printing/copying even though the text contains some complex instructions and explanations and much other useful material. Without being able to have some of that material at hand in hardcopy it loses much of its value. Even the debugging tools in chapter 45 have complicated (for the novice) use instructions that are almost worthless unless you can print them and have them in front of you while you install and learn to use it.

This is just frustrating and thoughtless from the customer's point of view (and probably of no use in preventing piracy to a determined hacker - which I presume is the reason the locked permissions were done). I've written Wiley to request a printable/copyable version of at least the 23 bonus chapters. If they send it to me, I'll revise my opinion to three-stars, and if they make those chapters available to all customers who purchased the book (cd holders), in a printable version, I'll go to four or maybe even five stars. Till then, I'm stickin' to my opinion.

JAVASCRIPT BIBLE by DANNY GOODMAN with MICHAEL MORRISON

In 1997 I obtained a copy of the second edition of Goodman's JavaScript Bible, in fact a translation of it, and probably not a very good one at that. In any case I experienced considerable difficulty in grasping certain details of the text, although I had some knowledge of programming already. But I really found the book very interesting, so I stumbled through up to the intricate applications at the end. Only a modest 600 pages at that time.
While designing DHTML-pages for a website - www.mesdagvancalcar.nl - I had to consult the Goodman Bible on many occasions. Therefore I decided to try and obtain an English version of the old edition to find out more exactly what the author had written. On second thoughts I bought the present sixth edition. In ten years the JavaScript Bible has been growing to a volume of three times the prior one.
In the past month I've read some 130 pages. These comprise a part of the sixth edition that was less prominent in the second edition: a tutorial. To my opinion it has a clear presentation, although I can't judge it unbiasedly as I'm not a genuine novice any more. I appreciate its method: from the very beginning it employs real scripts. But I do understand the criticism of some other buyers who expected a stepwise introduction to the elements of the language before being exposed to completely working scripts. That is what you won't find here. May be a beginner would do wise and rather buy an introductory text of less than say 100 pages. A volume of 1600 pages is very discouraging.
A book of 35 chapters counting a great deal more than 1000 pages is already slightly unwieldy. So I'm really glad that the additional 23 chapters have found room on a CD. Of these "bonus" chapters I particularly appreciate the one on solving script errors, that has increased considerably in comparison with my old copy of the bible. I'm not sure, however, whether I like it in PDF-format. Adobe's free Acrobat Reader has forced people to believe that PDF is always necessary. But PDF is inferior to HTML on a computer screen, the letters being too small or the page not conforming to the window dimensions. The page numbers are wrong for books with a separate introduction. The images are still undecipherable in a magnification where the text is just right. Nobody is going to print the 23 chapters of the accompanying CD. That would cost you many times the price of the present book on paper and, particularly, ink. Not counting the time you need to watch your printer labouring through 500 bonus pages. Only for the first printed 1100 pages of the JavaScript Bible PDF would be practical: you can rapidly reach the corresponding location in your hard copy after a find-action.
Even in such an extensive textbook as this one, not every detail has been given attention. For example, I could not easily find information on what is sometimes called an associative array. In its introductory section on arrays it is not clearly stated that strings, too, are allowed as an array index, although such a possibility has been applied at different locations in the book. I may be wrong but it seems to me that only on page 952 this rule is noted in passing.
All in all, I don't regret having ordered the JavaScript Bible, sixth edition by Danny Goodman with Michael Morrison, and I look forward to the reference parts that I have given only a superficial glance until here.

Rob Vetter, october 2010

Excellent tutorial and reference book. After looking at about ten js books, this is the best.

The searchable PDF on the CD is great. I agree with other reviewers that it has flaws and is also self-admittedly non-w3c compliant in places, but they include non-compliant code where useful, and kudos to them for it.

It's the only Javascript/dhtml book I own, though I own many programming and a few web-development books. When combined with the online [...] sites you can do anything.

Good book. I've been perusing books trying to learn core JavaScript for developing Adobe Acrobat. Not much out there on core JavaScript; all the books are on HTML implementation and so is this one. But the author teaches JavaScript "programming" (which is what core JS is) in addition to HTML but necessarily uses HTML examples and exercises. I can work with that.

Everywhere I turn I have read that "JavaScript: the Definitive Guide" is the best for learning core because half the book is dedicated to core and the other half is on HTML. But "the definitive guide" is more like a reference for those who already know JavaScript or general programming. That doesn't make it bad; it just doesn't teach you how. If you already know JS or programming you might as well just refer to the "Core JS Guide" and "Reference" for free online at Mozilla.

I was just spinning wheels before this book and now, at least, I'm making some progress.

Good book.

Thanks.

This book suffers from the drawbacks of all programming "Bibles" which try to cover everything. It is decent as a reference for a specific topic, but sketchy as a book to teach you the basics of JavaScript. I'm only on chapter 14, so I haven't got too far into the book, but I find it extremely frustrating. People who know nothing about computer programming should steer clear of this book. The first couple chapters seem easy enough, but then the JavaScript Bible starts throwing a bunch of examples and terminology at you which you won't understand unless you already know how to program. For instance, the book starts using arrays without any explanation of how they work. As someone who knows half a dozen computer languages, I could follow the examples, but I was frustrated by the lack of structure in the book. Core concepts of the JavaScript language are not explained. Basic things like data types are never really covered and the explanation of the fundamentals of the language aren't explained until chapter 13, when they only warrant 3 lousy pages. The idea is that people just want to jump into the good stuff and won't have the patience to plow through chapters explaining the fundamentals of the JavaScript language, but I buy a book about JavaScript so that I will learn those fundamentals. So, buy another book if you want a decent introduction to JavaScript.

The other thing that I find annoying are the detailed references to extremely outdated versions of Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator. What web designer today worries about any web browser before IE5.5? Some of the text feels a decade out of date.

Nonetheless, this book is good for people who already know JavaScript and need to look up a specific topic. It covers a huge number of topics and is probably the most comprehensive reference available for the entire JavaScript language. So it is definitely worth buying. Even for a JavaScript beginner like me, I am getting something out of this book, so it isn't a total waste.