234 of 260 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Final Word (incl review of critics), September 23, 2000
As you may know, this book is considered THE Javascript book. What's makes the book worthwhile is it's fine discussion of Javascript's innerworkings. If you really want learn how Javascript's objects, functions, and data type handling work, then this is the book for you. The criticisms of this book fall into three catagories: 1) "Not for beginners". Yes, this book is not intended for people who have never studied object oriented programming. But that doesn't make it a 2 star book! Even beginners, if they are serious enough, will eventually need some clues about how Javascript really works. 2) "It's outdated". Again, yes; the reference section, and some of the browser dependant discussion is clearly outdated; BUT that still does not make this an outdated book! The author's in-depth explanation of Javascript innerworkings may never become outdated, and that alone is what makes this book worthwhile. 3) "Not enough examples". This is the only criticism that I
actually agree with, and therefore the 4, instead of 5 stars. Not only can this book benefit from additional small examples, but the author's explanations are sometimes lacking, or even worse, missing. On a few examples, he basically says, "This is worthy of study. Go ahead and study it." Sorry, I expect more from my books, than a grumpy professor in a university lecture hall, nearing the end of class.
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87 of 95 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wow - THE best Javascript book available!, August 23, 1998
I purchased the Netscape One Developer's Guide thinking it would provide answers to my Javascript questions - it answered very few, unfortunately. The 'Guide' doesn't begin to approach the ease of use, thoroughness or amount of information contained in "Javascript: The Definitive Guide". Javascript is as completely covered as it can be (with the free-flowing nature of WWW specifications, its hard to keep track of all the changes). I found the descriptions and examples informative, clear and concise and kinda fun sometimes. The layed back nature of the writing won't scare off novice coders/web developers and yet doesn't turn off more advanced developers. The book is cut in half - the first provides an introduction into Javascript and discusses its more important subjects while the second is a complete reference section for Javascript 1.2. It specifically treats the differences between Netscape and Internet Explorer whereas the Netscape One guide left that up to the reader to figure out - an oversight which relegates the Netscape One Developer's Handbook to the dusty bookshelf (way in the back). If you're doing web development and need to use Javascript - this is probably the only book you'll need. If you're doing web development and you're not using Javascript - you NEED this book - it will show you what you can do with simple client-side scripts.
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98 of 108 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The best Javascript reference, April 27, 2000
This is the best Javascript reference available.
The book is divided into three sections. The first covers "Core Javascript", defining the language itself with only occasional references to how you might use it in a browser. This initially seemed to me to be a roundabout way to approach the language--why wouldn't you want to explain it by examples in a web page? However, after becoming more familiar with the language I think it was absolutely the right decision, since it avoids confusing the document object model (see below for more about that) with the language itself, a confusion common among beginners.
At the end of the first section (which developers experienced in other languages can skim, but shouldn't skip) you know what Javascript code looks like and how to do assignments, define functions, and so on. The second section, "Client-side Javascript", is where examples start to show up that you can really run in a test page of your own. The examples are good and there are plenty of them.
The heart of the second section is the discussion of the document object model. After some introductory discussion, covering windows and frames and some of the more common Javascript tasks, there's an overview of the DOM. Subsequent chapters cover it in more detail. This organization makes it pretty easy to find what you need without even resorting to the index. For example, I find the forms chapter, and the chapter on how to use cookies to save state, to be very useful, and easy to find information in.
Finally, there's a reference section at the back. This is the most valuable section once you're well on your way with the language, and is what I now use most of all. It's comprehensive and clearly written.
The book does have one weakness, which has been noted by other reviewers here: it doesn't have a "cookbook" section, showing you how to do common tasks with Javascript. This is a serious omission because of the nature of Javascript usage. Very often a webmaster for a small non-profit or a small business will decide they want to do a rollover, or add an alert for form validation failures, or something similar. Users like this need something equivalent to the "Perl Cookbook"; a "How to . . ." section that gives you an example close to what you need.
Despite this caveat, however, this is still the best book around: an excellent reference, and a great way to learn the language.
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