Customer Reviews

JavaScript Unleashed (3rd Edition)

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

 

 

It's exactly what I wanted! There are many points I recommend this book to you. 1st, it covers the most appropriate issues. Basically, this book focuses on client-side development and covers almost all of it. Some books cover even server-side issues such as servlet, ASP, JSP while they are lacking in the main subject, client-side issues. If we want to learn server-side issues, we can just pick these kinds of books (Sun's JSP book is good). 2nd, it's well organized. For people who don't have a time to read everything, this well-organized book is really helpful. There are 35 chapters and each chapter pick up precise one distinct topic. You can skim and scan whichever you want. 3rd, a lot of useful sample codes and graphical outputs enable us to learn JavaScript easily. The definition of good programming books is how much they contain sample codes. This is it. 4th, If you are beginner for JavaScript, just take this. I'm a Java programmer but I'm a beginner for JavaScript and even HTML. However, this book helped me without any extra beginner books. Anyway, it's worthy of $50.

As a practical introduction to the language, this book was pretty much what I was looking for. And it's pretty readable, much more so than a lot of other big fat JavaScript books I looked at. So I guess I'd recommend it. But a few major provisos:

1) if you've done any programming in another language before, you will find the first couple of hundred pages heavy going, as it explains very basic concepts in excessive detail. But you still need to read these chapters as a few things come up which are peculiar to JavaScript.

2) It's just plain wrong, or incomplete in places. For instance, the browser-detection example given doesn't actually work because of some basic errors in the code. And it neglects to mention a lot of the vital peculiarities where Netscape's JavaScript and IE's JScript diverge in their behaviour. If the book is to be believed you'd think all Javascript 1.2 code would work on the latest Netscape and Microsoft browsers. It won't. It's just not that easy unfortunately.

3) Good for learning, but not much use as a "reference". Hard to find the info you want while you're coding, and when you do find it it's frequently too sketchy to give you any insight into your problem.

So don't rely on this book as your only JavaScript reference. You will have to look elsewhere to find out the truth and get your scripts working properly. Particularly if you want your code to work in Explorer.

For the life of me I don't understand why this book hasn't rated higher here?

"JavaScript Unleased" is clearly written with to-the-point explanations. The examples are real world and fit in nicely with each chapter while the book covers the latest version of JavaScript (1.5) completely. The David Flanagan/O'Reilly and Danny Goodman/Bible books are ancient history from 1998 already! I also feel this book is more complete than the Flanagan book and Danny Goodman's explanations are too wordy.

If your are an intermediate to experienced developer buy this book you won't regret it.

I have purchased and read a lot of technical manuals, and more then a few of these have been JavaScript guides. This was my first JavaScript purchase and it is still the one I refer to every time. I like the way it is organized, with lessons mixed with examples and little-known facts. Ordinarily I prefer O'Reilly books, but the O'Reilly JavaScript book is inferior to this one. JavaScript Unleashed is a superior text, though the CD-ROM was not at all helpful.

Alan Wyke's revised, expanded and updated, JavaScript Unleashed, Third Edition continues to serve as an effective and reliable reference to the JavaScript language for the high-end programmer as well as a guide for developing JavaScript applications from the ground up. The topics most important to the intermediate to advanced Javascript programmer are informatively covered, including Web security, integrating JavaScript with Java, and forms and data validation. Intermediate - Advanced, 1100 pages.

This book repeatedly repeats information multiple times, if you see what I mean. It is organized hierarchically. You first get an overview, then the book drops down to a more detailed description, then drops down another level to a yet more detailed description of the same concepts. The introductory material is too detailed, given that it will be explained again later. And within a section concepts are reiterated at no particular benefit to the reader. This is how they make the book so fat.

Another complaint: Methods are presented without giving a list of arguments. How do you know how to use them?

The book is readable and may be helpful to the neophyte programmer.

This book is quite disappointing, I read more than half of it and still feel unconfident with javascript. The author missed a lot of details to cover, such as in the book sometimes the code statements end with semicolon while sometimes don't, but I was never told that's because you can omit semicolon if your statement is in different line. After reading more than half of the book, I found only one code example is interesting and helpful, the rest of them are just superficial and nearly useless. I can confidently say you will find much better book than this one.

I borrowed this book from the library, I enjoyed some chapters on detailed descriptions of JavaScript and all of its capabilities but I was not impressed with the CD-Rom which did not work due to broken links to images etc. The reason for them not working was because the images had not been placed on the CD-Rom ... Whoever checked the errors in this book should be ashamed of themselves.

I would give this book an average mark mainly due to the CD-Rom not working. I would not suggest buying it for this reason but lending it is recommended.

This book is an exercise in frustration. It gives sketchy (or no) descriptions of object's properties and methods, it lets you know what the properties and methods are but (about 90% of the time) doesn't tell you how to use them. It has very little code, and what it does have is useless snippets which show you nothing practical (unless you are writing a book). It includes numerous methods and functions that IE6 doesn't recognize (neither did my HTML editor). This book is a big, thick waste of money.

As an experienced programmer (C++, PERL etc.) needing an introduction to Javascript to enhance my own website I found this book very readable and useful.