Customer Reviews

JavaScript: The Definitive Guide: Activate Your Web Pages (Definitive Guides)

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Readers should note that most of the reviews of this book refer to older editions which are -- due to the rapid evolution of javascript -- completely different books. I've spent a considerable amount of time the last few months reading the 6th edition of this book and have a number of complaints. But first, the kudos: this book is more comprehensive than any other javascript reference.

Complaints:
- the text is frequently non-linear in the sense that author will talk about undefined feature X, stating that feature X will be explained a couple of chapters later. Sometimes this is a good way to gradually introduce concepts, but it's used too much here. Some critics of this book have suggested you need to know javascript before reading this book, this might be why.

- Almost every concept is followed with the caveat "but this feature doesn't work in Internet Explorer prior to version Z. For that you have to use this entirely different function f". This makes the text unnecessarily confusing. How about talking about *standard* ECMAscript and relegating the caveats to end of chapter notes, perhaps adding a superscript to alert the reader about version incompatibilities?

- The examples are poor -- most show how to re-implement javascript 5 functions in javascript 3, or how to get a standard function to work in Internet Explorer 8. Who cares? This is why we have jQuery and Dojo -- in order not to worry about stuff like this. A few examples like this would provide welcome insight into dealing with compatibility issues, but in this case my eyes started to glaze over after a few hundred pages.

Case study: Chapter 17, "Handling Events". After reading much of this chapter I realized I didn't know anything about how to use events in actual, practical code. I went back to re-read the chapter, which starts on p. 445. The first example "snippet" doesn't occur until p. 457 and the first real example is on p. 466, demonstrating a "whenReady" function which shows you how "you can improve the startup time of your web applications if you trigger your scripts on events other than 'load'." Somewhat interesting, but is this really the best first example on event processing? The next example illustrates dragging an object, and is already quite complex and hard to follow.

The beginning of Ch. 17 tells us "An event object is an object that is associated with a particular event and contains details
about that event. Event objects are passed as an argument to the event handler function (except in IE8 and before where they are sometimes only available through the global variable event). All event objects have a type property that specifies the event type and
a target property that specifies the event target. (In IE8 and before, use srcElement instead of target.) Each event type defines a set of properties for its associated event." OK, how about an EXAMPLE illustrating how this works in real code? It's nearly impossible to get much out of this comment (and certainly impossible to retain anything) without an example. Only someone who already knows this stuff will follow that effectively, and if you already know the material, why read this chapter?

Additionally, some standard methods appear not to be documented in the client-side reference. Unfortunately I can't recall which ones at the moment; just remember looking for them and not finding them.

The "camel" book "Programming Perl" by Wall, Christiansen, and Orwant continues to be the gold standard for programming books by almost any measure, despite the fact that the current edition (3rd) is now terribly out of date. This book is readable, starts out with a good overview and then gradually dips the reader into the complexities of the language, included good examples, and frankly is an extremely enjoyable read. By comparison, this book meets none of these metrics. As a side note, O'Reilly (also the publisher of Programming Perl) used to be the dominant technical book publisher by huge margins, but in the past few years has begun to fall behind newer, more nimble competitors like Packt and Manning, who offer steep discounts on ebook editions and who appear to be taking greater care to maintain content quality. The affect is that at one time I would have simply assumed that the O'Reilly title was the highest quality text on any particular issue and now I'm finding this is not the case more often than not.

I must also add that I'm a fairly experienced programmer with some prior javascript experience; hence presumably a member of the target audience for this book. Whatever it's shortcomings and merits, and as other reviewers have pointed out, this book is COMPLETELY inappropriate for novice programmers and beginners. Stay far away, newbies, lest you burn in the pit of doom.

JavaScript: The Definitive Guide is not just a complete reference of the language, like O'Reilly's other 'thick books,' but also provides a deep dive into JavaScript development. However, if you're just starting out and will be using one of the various libraries (like jQuery), this book may not (yet) be for you.

First, the sixth edition is the first I've read, so I can't speak to any changes. Instead, my review is focused on the book as a first-timer reader to the 'series.'

JavaScript: The Definitive Guide is broken up into four parts; Core JavaScript, Client-Side JavaScript, the Core JavaScript Reference, and the Client-Side Reference. If you've ever picked up one of O'Reilly's other reference books, like Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference, you know about what to expect from those last two parts - a deep reference to the language.

The first two parts, however, are a 'deep dive' into the actual language itself. Unlike a mere reference book, JavaScript: The Definitive Guide actually teaches you how to develop in JavaScript, starting at the core fundamentals, and working your way up to more advanced topics.

Part of the 'deep dive' aspect also includes following best practices, making numerous references to Douglas Crockford's JavaScript: The Good Parts throughout the first part of the book, which is about 30% of the book. Alone, the first part of the book provides an excellent, near-complete, tutorial on the language.

Historical information is also included, which I found to be very interesting when it came up, as well as implementation-specific functionality, that has limited use at this time (and as such, I personally found it distracting, and began skimming over later instances, but it's still nice that it's provided).

The second part focuses on the Web aspects, which is quite honestly where most people will be making use of JavaScript. This part covers about what you'd expect, as well as jQuery, client-side storage, and HTML5 functionality.

The jQuery information is around 60 pages of content, covers version 1.4, and also includes a bit about jQueryUI (a very little bit). It's quite refreshing to see jQuery included in the book, but as noted initially, if you're looking at focusing just on using a library, it may be better to get a resource focused on just that.

The second part is approximately 40% of the book.

The third and fourth parts are similar to O'Reilly's other reference books, and are therefore fairly detailed, with examples included. Depending upon your preference, you may find the reference valuable, or prefer searching online. The examples included give the book a slight advantage over the average Web site. Honestly, I generally prefer using online resources, so I don't see myself consulting these later parts very often, if at all.

Finally we come to the actual book itself. I received an electronic copy of the book, through the O'Reilly Blogger Review Program, so I can't speak to the quality of a physical copy. However, in the past I have generally found O'Reilly books to be well made, with bindings that last.

And now comes the rating.

After the first part of this book I was impressed by JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, and could easily have stopped there and been happy. The jQuery inclusion was a nice touch, which may be sufficient to push people who weren't thinking about using a library in their development to doing so, and may actually provide enough information for someone who wants to start learning JavaScript via jQuery. It is, in short, a true guide to JavaScript, and not just a reference book.

For these reasons, I must give JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, 5 of 5 stars.

This book is called 'the definitive guide' for a reason: it is by far the most complete book on Javascript that you can buy. Every subject, from syntax to popular libraries is covered. The 6th edition is completely updated to reflect the latest standard, ECMAscript 5. The newest features such as localstorage and geolocation are explained in this new edition. The book follows a clear outline. It starts by explaining the language and it's syntax, followed by it's features. Next is the usage of the language, both as a client-side language and as a server-side language. The book also covers the most popular Javascript library: jQuery.

I found the book, although it is written as a reference, easy and entertaining to read. The book is a great resource to use while developing Javascript, because every little detail is covered. A good indication of its quality is that the book survived five editions and is still going strong! What I did miss is some guidance around real world Javascript development and tooling. The book does not explain anything around unit testing, development environments and other useful tooling. That would be a welcome addition for the 7th edition!

It's not step-by-step manual for learning Javascript but it is definitely the most comprehensive and complete book on Javascript you will ever find. Everything you need to know about the language is there and with a good amount of examples too. How can you be without it? It is a given that an intermediate, and advanced user would benefit from this book, but I would dare say that even a beginner would greatly benefit. If your new to Javascript, or never programmed before then I would suggest the learning series for javascript, or the Head First series(for visual learners), to get you started (I chose the Head First series). But soon enough, you will quickly find as you hunger for more, you will need this book as well. Especially when you are learning a new language, you need to have a good reference on hand so you can practice and experiment beyond that of the simple examples. It helps you comprehend and better understand what going on. It also helps you to see all that is possible with the language. Simply put, this book is a necessity to mastering the Javascript language.

I simply wanted to say how much David's book has meant to my learning and understanding of Javascript, and programming in general. I had initially tried learning through many free sources online, and while most were very good in tackling specific issues or illustrating solutions to esoteric problems, none gave me the confidence that I was getting a solid foundation in the language, or programming in general.

In search of something better, I looked to stackoverflow which constantly recommended David's book. To be honest, I pirated it first. But after the first 3 chapters I went straight to Amazon and bought it, as well as Javascript Patters from Stoyan and Douglas's Crockford book Javascript: the good parts (another big hit on the stackoverflow forums). I was dumbfounded at how easy and clear his book made the language. For the first time, ideas were presented in a logical order, with concepts obviously introduced to build on previous ones. Concepts I've been told are essential (hoisting, closures, etc) but were intimidating because I'd never seen them in a cohesive narrative, shocked me in how intuitive they actually were when written well and paired with succinct examples.

I know this all seems overzealous enough to border on the insincere, but for someone who always had a passion for technology and wanted to create his own, but was beginning to be deterred from it all because I thought it was simply above my grasp, I want to say thank you to David and O'Reilly.

They very may well have single-handedly created a new developer, and have dramatically changed my life in the process.

Thanks again.

This is a "must have" book for anyone writing JavaScript for use with web pages. No matter what your level of JavaScript knowledge (as long as you know some JavaScript) you will be able to benefit from this book. It comprehensively covers JavaScript as it is today. While not all of the new JavaScript statements are supported by all browsers in common use, the book clearly describes how to work around that lack of support so that your script doesn't crash while still benefiting from the advances in what the language allows.

The book covers both the modern approach to writing JavaScript as well as how JavaScript used to be written (so as to help you to understand what the old code actually does). Most of the time the book does make the distinction between them and advises you as to which is the appropriate way to do things.

Perhaps the antiquated info that has the most space dedicated to it is browser sniffing using the user enterable free format user_agent information in the navigator object - while there are unfortunately lots of web pages that have made the mistake of using this the approach has actually been obsolete since Netscape 2 introduced feature sensing. The book does admit that browser sniffing is 'problematic' but still devotes a couple of pages to how to do it where that space would have been better used to list a summary of a few of the reasons why you shouldn't use it.

The complete opposite approach is taken with regard to the now antiquated document.write statement with the book including the code for a streaming API for innerHTML to make it a trivial exercise to get rid of all such antiquated statements.

The very few flaws in this book make up a minute fraction of the book but they stood out for me mainly because the rest of the book is to such a high standard. This book isn't for beginners but for anyone who has even a slight knowledge of JavaScript, this is a book you need to get. If you can only afford one JavaScript book then get this one.

This book has delivered exactly what I was hoping for, an in-depth look into modern day JavaScript.

I rarely use JavaScript nowadays in my day to day job. I have been lucky to avoid the messy browser applications it is usually a part of the past few years. That was my primary reason for buying the book. Although I may not like it, JavaScript is here to stay, and I need to keep current with it.

The book is broken into 4 parts. Core JavaScript, Client-Side JavaScript, Core JavaScript Reference, and Client-Side JavaScript Reference.

The book has chapters on Lexical Structure, Expressions and Operators, Statements, Objects, Arrays, Functions, Classes and Modules, Pattern Matching with Regular Expressions, JavaScript Subsets and Extensions, Server-Side JavaScript, JavaScript in Web Browsers, The Window Object, Scripting Documents, Scripting CSS, Handling Events, Scripted HTTP, The jQuery Library, Client-Side Storage, Scripted Media and Graphics, HTML5 APIs, and then continues on with the Core JavaScript Reference and the Client-Side JavaScript Reference.

The downloadable code is very well organized and usable. All the code in the book, and there is a ton of it, is available.

The book is very well written and makes for a really good read as well as a great reference. It is in depth and very thorough.

All in all I think this a great book. It will be on my desk for the next few years until I need to replace it with the 8th or 9th version.

If you are a web developer, you need this book by your side.

Keep in mind I'm writing this review and I'm only 70 pages into this monster (plus some random skimming)

This book seems to be highly recommended by all the big and well known names in JS Development.

Having worked through a few substandard JS books (which there seems to be plenty of), I decided to spring for it. I'm blown away with how comprehensive this thing is. I wish all my college textbooks were up to this standard. It's true that this isn't for someone new to programming, or even someone new to JavaScript. [I found "Eloquent Javascript" (which is a free online book) to be a good starter book. I say this after having looked at the head start book (complete rubbish) and Wrox's Beginning JavaScript (crap).]

Anyway,it's dense and not something you're going to get through fast.
I'm taking the approach my Calculus Professor recommended for 'reading a math text'. You read a math text with a pencil and paper. When presented with a proof you should work through it step by step with pencil and paper so that you can see the logic behind it, then try it out with some examples. Well, instead of pencil and paper I have my laptop next to me with the cloud9 IDE up (a great and simple browser based editor I'm growing fond of). As each new concept (at least, each concept that is new to me) is presented I try it out on the editor and print the output to the console. As I work through it and grasp what it does I "poke it with a stick" by trying some different things with it. I already feel like I have a better grasp of the basics then I ever did with my previous experiences.

I'm sure this book isn't perfect...I don't think that's possible in the world of technology books. But it's substantially higher quality than many I've read including $180 college texts.

Very complete book about the world of Javascript technology not just the language.

I am an experienced coder, I needed to code a web application from scratch with a lot of Javascript features, I got this book plus the JQuery Cookbook and I pretty much had all the tools I needed for the job.

What I particularly like about the book are the complete descriptions of the language features and idioms, the chapters about the JQuery library (a must-have-tool for web developers), NodeJs and of course the one about Javascript for browsers.

With an author having a CS degree from MIT like David Flanagan, you could expect a book which presents notions and concepts in a consistent and systematic way.

This book fits well into that expectation.

However, probably due to the lack of time working with top-notch JavaScript real-world projects, David sometimes has the tendency to use academic words to replace real-world code and practical explanations.

That is why you find some paragraphs too much wordy than it should be for a programmer reader.