Customer Reviews

JavaScript Web Applications

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Being a Java Swing developer for many years, I was never a fan of JavaScript. There were no mature tools and frameworks a few years ago. Straight DOM programming was just error-prone and difficult to debug. Over the last few years, JavaScript has come back with a big bang, thanks to a lot of companies, among them, Google. This book is for people, like me, who gave up on JavaScript years ago because of a poor model but need to know new frameworks that help in writing concise, readable code, and also help design scalable and robust architecture, not to mention, using JavaScript with a large team that could be geographically spread out.

Frankly, this book won't teach you the basics of JavaScript. There are plenty of other books for that and the author mentions this up front. However, in my opinionion, the author does a great job of teaching how to use the simplified and concise form of JavaScript, sticking to OO way of doing it. He starts with MVC (and who doesn't love MVC!), events, models, data, controller, state, view, and templating. The examples are mostly in JQuery which is also my framework of choice for JavaScript development.

No real-time discussion of JavaScript is complete without the mention of WebSockets, Node.js, and Socket.IO. The author does a great job of explaining this in chapter 8. He also provides an example of how to make your applications look faster (perceived speed) as compared to actual speed. The later chapters focus on testing and debugging, deploying, and an overview of the Spine, Backbone, and JavaScriptMVC libraries. Appendix at the end of the book provide a JQuery primer and a reference to CSS extensions and CSS3.

I cannot say that after reading this book, I have fallen in love with JavaScript since I am a big fan of Adobe Flex. However, I have many JavaScript projects under my belt and this book is a valuable resource for me to ensure that my apps scale well and that my offshore resources use the sandbox model to avoid tight coupling and ensure reusability.

The world is moving away from server-side templating and there are all kinds of new gizmos out there that shove the application logic to the client. This book gives you a pretty good idea of what libraries and frameworks are available to help you make the switch as well as what their strengths and weaknesses are. Several of the projects covered are unfortunately quite terrible, and I got the impression that they were included only so that the author could avoid accusations of bias toward his own Spine.js.

You do need to know JavaScript and not just jQuery party tricks you copy and paste off of stackoverflow, but I wouldn't say that its audience is limited to elite programmers who work at Yahoo. Actually, I wouldn't say that any elite programmers work at Yahoo anymore, period.

Alex (the author) wrote Spine and is an accomplished JavaScript expert. This book is for his peers, not for web developers looking for design patterns to help tame the client-side tangle. If this desciption is already beginning to sound familiar, focus your efforts on consuming a library like Spine or KnockoutJS and save your hard earned dollars for books that provide applied guidance.

In the preface, Alex indicates that the key prequisite for getting benefit from this book is modest JavaScript experience up to and including JQuery. I've been using JQuery for years and have an intermediate understanding of core JavaScript. I am not a JavaScript expert, I'm a JavaScript application developer. If your experience is similar to mine, you may want to go elsewhere for advancing your skills. I respectfully submit that you must be a JavaScript expert to benefit from this book.

On the other hand, if you are a JavaScript expert and you would like to design and build your own MVC JavaScript library, this book is for you.

IMHO, this book is for 1 in 100 developers - the elite who work for Yahoo or similar software vendor.

I'm humbled by programmers like Alex and truly appreciate their efforts. Sincere apologies and best wishes to Mr. MacCaw.

JavaScript Web Applications is not a book for beginners. In fact, you need to have been doing a fair share of JavaScript development to benefit from it. But if you do, It's indispensable! Because this is finally a book that's showing how to structure your application in a way that keeps you sane as the application grows.

Actually, this book was just what I needed right now. I've been thinking a lot about how to better structure my JavaScript applications and have read some articles about libraries such as Backbone.js but never really dove into it. Until now. After reading this book I got really inspired and am currently using Backbone.js and a lot of the approaches from the book in two projects so far.

So if you have lots of experience with JavaScript but never managed to get your apps structured properly, this is the book for you.

I have been using Backbone.js, in CoffeeScript, in my professional work, and I love it. The Spine framework for JavaScript MVC apps caught my eye shortly after I started using Backbone, and in my personal time I've been tinkering with it and with Spine Mobile. Both are by Alex MacCaw, the author of this great book.

JavaScript Web Applications follows along with the development of Spine. To prepare for a recent talk I gave on the topic, I spent the weekend reading the book and checking out Spine's current CoffeeScript source. The sections on classes, events, and dependency management definitely improved my general understanding of JavaScript, for any intermediate/advanced usage of the language, not just for MVC applications. The book left me inspired to create my own framework (not as hard as it sounds, although you might question the purpose), or at least to write some extensions for Spine.

After only three weeks into owning the book, this is already among the most dog-eared books in my collection. It provides a clear and timely intro to developing apps in Javascript, making sense of what is otherwise a very dynamic and turbulent field of development.

It is an engagingly written and concise guide to exactly what its title describes: developing web applications in Javascript. It covers a wide range of topics, from setting up a generic MVC framework, persistence locally and via ajax, controllers, views, working with files, debugging and systematic testing, CSS and templates.

It's like getting a complete set of legos as a kid, with initial models to follow at first and then adapt to your own creative directions. Working through the examples is quick and addicting, and at the end you have the beginnings of the beautiful web app that you always wanted to develop.

In contrast to other reviewers, you definitely do not need to be a Javascript expert to follow along. You do need to know some Javascript and jQuery, but that's about it. You'll learn Javascript along the way.

The author does present his own framework, Spine JS, but in a completely equal even-handed presentation with Backbone JS and Javascript MVC. This book is equally good for learning all three. (And having done so, the motivation for Spine JS becomes clear, it's a simple elegant way of doing the same things with less code, plus a few extra benefits like decoupling the client from the server).

It's helpful to know how to set up your own RESTful web service (not included in this book) to try out the Ajax persistence, but even so you can get by just fine without it using local persistence in HTML 5.

This book has a fast pace, no thoroughly introduction of MVC, I think this is justified. MVC has been explained a lot of times the last decade. The author of this book explains a lot of modern frameworks en modern technologies
This book is not for the novice javscript developers even the intermediate developers can have a hard task grasping the contents of this book. You need to understand the core of javascript and jQuery as well as design patterns, at least a couple of them to get the most out of this book.
Personally for me the topic of this book is a bit overkill for the web applications I develop. Hence if the scale of my webapps grows more complex I will definitely turn to this book. It will explain a lot of usefull state of the art Javascript MVC frameworks.
After explaining several ways of working with events in javascript application the author starts digging into MVC. First a chapter on Models and ORM (Object-relational mapping) and how to populate your model with external data. Offline as well as online storage of the model is also described in this chapter. The next chapter is about the controller, the best ways of event delegation and accessing the views. And finally the views itself, with modern js templating techniques. After the MVC foundation Spine.js and Backbone.js are introduced and explained. Two of the most known patterns for small ( spine.js ) to large ( Backbone.js ) web applications.
I also liked to addional information on modern topics like LESS ans CSS 3 and NodeJS. For me this was pure complementary information, and I had rather seen some more introduction in the beginning.

Bottom line
JavaScript Web Application is a must have book to plan and develop larger applications. It tells you everything you need to know to structure a application, but I think it would help to read other book before this book to get the most out of it, for example Javascript Patterns. The books page: JavaScript Web Applications

Disclaimer: I received a review copy fromm Oreilly

Great idea for a book and much of the content is first class. Make sure you've read JavaScript the Good Parts and/or JavaScript Patterns and have learned the basics of JQuery before even attempting to read this book though, otherwise your going to have trouble following along with some of the content.

Unfortunately it does have some falws. In particular I found some of the descriptions of code samples were lacking, additionally many of the code samples seemed un-necessarily terse/confusing. Normally I wouldn't massively care about this sort of thing in code samples, however when coupled with the use of some of JavaScripts odder features they make the code a bit painful to read. Thats not to say you can't understand whats going on, you just have to put in more effort than you might expect and you probably won't find it as enjoyable as you'd like.

These issues are the main reason I've given the book just three stars. I'm hoping the issues will be addressed in any future second edition, at which time this will definitely be a five star book.

One other thing, chapter 11 is on Spine.js. This chapter is now a little out-of-date, for example Spine now uses CoffeeScripts classes, so you may want to use the excellent online documentation for spine.js instead.

If you are trying to learn about js basics - Objects, Object literals, Contructors, variables, array - all those fundamentals, you will be better off reading books like JavaScript - Good Parts, or Javascript for Web Developers (NZ). This book is about taking all the basics that you have learned including OOP concepts that you maybe aware of, and create a structured javascript based web app. It talks about mvc way of structuring code, goes over the different available frameworks that uses mvc technique.
My only wish is that the book could have been little more descriptive and explanatory with few more examples.