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16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Time-Saving Store of Scripting Knowledge, July 27, 2010
This review is from: JavaScript Cookbook (Paperback)
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One bit of advice if you are like me when you get a reference collection of this sort: I immediately flip through the table of contents or the index to get to whatever topic I am currently obsessing on.
In the case of this book, you may want to spend a few minutes in the oft-ignored preface. It contains some noteworthy information on the author's approach. Specifically:
"Many of the examples won't work with IE6. Before I even began the book I decided not to provide support for IE6--including any workaround code."
The author is a bit more forgiving in the case of IE7: "Where IE7 doesn't work, either I provide IE7-specific workarounds in comments in the example code you can download, or I make a note about nonsupport in the recipe--or both."
I work on teams developing browser-based applications for the real world, so IE6 is still absolutely relevant to me. In fact, the corporation for which I honestly sweat is itself "standardized" on IE6 for all employees. Even so, I still recommend this book because of the relevancy of the examples and its forward-looking approach.
The fact that the code download file is about 63 megs compressed should give an idea of how much is contained in this big store of scripting knowledge.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A lot of javascript solutions, August 15, 2010
This review is from: JavaScript Cookbook (Paperback)
Javascript is similar enough to languages I know that I've just picked up enough of it along the way to get done whatever I needed to. I read this book in hope of getting solutions I could adapt for some of my web programming needs while learning more about what javascript could do now and in HTML5. I was not disappointed as the book met those expectations and then some.
As a cookbook, the book follows a Problem, Solution, Discussion format. The problems addressed are grounded in the real world and the solutions vary from very simple to rather complex. The discussion provides in depth information about the solution and sometimes includes alternatives. Of particular interest to me on the first reading were the chapters on event handling, form elements, and persistence. I was also pleased that the solutions addressed handling the current versions of the four major browsers.
Bottom line: After reading this book I have a better understanding of javascript and what I can do with it. I will be keeping it handy as a source for code snippets as well as a reference for future javascript coding.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good jump start to get familar with new APIs, August 7, 2010
This review is from: JavaScript Cookbook (Paperback)
In developing mid to large scale web applications nowadays, it's a common practice to leverage JavaScript frameworks such as Prototype, Scriptaculous and JQuery. As the author of JavaScript Cookbook points out, "in order to use a framework library like jQuery to its best ability, you need to understand what's happening under the hood." JavaScript Cookbook provides a good amount of information on the fundamental and new features of JavaScript. For example, the book covers ECMAScript 5 features (e.g., Array object methods "forEach", "map" and "filter") with concrete use scenarios in the format of classic "cookbook" receipts, accompanied with snippets of code in the context.
Going beyond these isolated "problems", the book also provides insights into what is needed in building real world web applications in terms of good practices and pragmatic idioms. For example, when showing you how to gracefully handle no JavaScript situations, the book provides a "historical" perspective on the existing solutions, how they have been evolved over the time and what establishes the current standard of good practice. The receipt starts with the simple <noscript> tag solution and presents a more concrete progressive disclosure form example in the middle; In the "See Also" section, a list of further readings (with URLs) are provided on the topic of "progressive enhancement". The book also covers more advanced topics such as how to implement object oriented programming with JavaScript Object and building custom code libraries.
Through different receipts, to depict the fast evolving landscape of front-end development, the book covers eye-catching topics such as HTML5 API such as "drag-and-drop", "web worker", filesystem access, as well as creating mobile widgets and native smart phone applications with HTML/JavaScript using open source translation tools.
As a UI developer, I've found the book a very good casual reading for me to get up to speed with the new APIs and trends and refresh my knowledge about the idiosyncracy of the language. The code snippets in the book are very complete and could be really handy to tackle some of the real-world problems.
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