Customer Reviews

JavaScript for the World Wide Web, Second Edition (Visual QuickStart Guide)

5 star:		(84)
4 star:		(45)
3 star:		(28)
2 star:		(32)
1 star:		(42)

 

 

I've just started using this one myself, and so far, it's proven to be an invaluable reference. I used to think JavaScript was a difficult and laborious language to learn, especially since the only coding I know is HTML, a little BASIC and some MUSH code (I'm not a programmer, can you tell? *grin*) After paging through the first few chapters of this book, and even jumping around a bit, it's not so much of a mystery anymore, and I now have a correct perception of this popular scripting language, as well as a decent working knowledge. Following the excellent path forged by other titles in the series, this guide is written in a candid, easy to understand manner. Best of all, just like the VQS Guide to HTML4, another of my favorites recommended elsewhere on this site, it's got a companion web site with all of the samples as well as further exercises. Don't waste your time reading thick books full of information you'll never use. Try this one and get to work writing JavaScript immediately. Once you get started and become better versed in the language, you'll want to keep the book nearby as an easy to use reference source.

I have found this book *extremely* helpful in integrating certain JavaScript elements into web pages (using the authors' web site which supplements the material in the book is essential, however.)I would highly recommend it to someone with little or no JavaScript knowledge. I think most of the negative reviews (the ones that rate it a star or two because it's "not for serious programmers") are missing the point. If you want to go on a trip to Mexico and need to learn some Spanish quickly to help you survive, you pick up a phrase book by Berlitz or some such publisher. Learning the entire grammar of the Spanish language would be a waste of time for this purpose. Likewise, if you want to read Cervantes in the original, memorizing how order a meal in a restaurant isn't going to help you much. I think the analogy holds true for this book - if you want to journey into the land of JavaScript, this is a good phrase book to help you get along (the authors themselves even encourage you to copy-and-paste many of the commands from their web site so you don't even have to do the typing.) If you want to delve into the grammar of the language, this book would be limited for that purpose.

Try as you might to take a class in JavaScript or implement scripts by using online resources, it remains on your to do list. You search the Internet for the scripts and can never find the exact one you want or even close enough to do tweaking. Perhaps, it's time to try an alternative and just buy a book on the subject and dive in.

This book is for beginners and intermediates who are comfortable with HTML and lack the time to learn how to implement JavaScript from scratch or without resources. Negrino and Smith set up the book by the "things" you want your Web site to do rather than walk you through all the definitions, objects, operators, syntax, and all that stuff that would make the non-programmer's eyes glaze over. There are other books that serve that purpose.

Open the book and go to the table of contents, find what you need, and start adding it to your Web pages. Screenshots and lines of code are on every page of the book with step-by-step guidelines of how to use and implement the script. You don't even have to type the code from scratch. Instead, go to the book's companion Web site to get the code and fix it up to meet your needs - a great time saver.

If you own an earlier edition of the book, this one has 100 more pages of new material including new chapters on 7 - Forms and Regular Expressions, 11 - CSS, 13 - User Interface Design with JavaScript, 14 - Applied JavaScript, and 15 - Bookmarklets. Furthermore, the scripts in the older editions have been revised to ensure compliance with current Web standards.

Chapter 7 - Forms and Regular Expressions show how to validate email addresses, file names, and URLs. It gives you a gentle introduction to regexes (regular expressions). Don't panic at the thought of them especially with the handy table of expressions and associated characters. Once you try them out, you'll wonder what you ever did without them.

Chapter 13 - User Interface Design with JavaScript gives you the opportunity to create pull-down and sliding menus. Chapter 14 - Applied JavaScript has directions for creating a slideshow with captions and generating bar graphs.

Colorful additions to the book are the Object Flowchart and Object Table printed in color to show you which objects are compatible with which browsers. The flowchart may be a challenge for beginners, but the table makes up for it by listing the object along with its properties, methods and event handlers.

If you're looking to get cooking with JavaScript, look no further than this cookbook with easily modifiable recipes. It belongs on the Web designer's reference shelf.

The JavaScript Visual Quickstart Guide has generated split reviews. Some people loved it and some others absolutely hate it. I'm about done with it, and here's what I have to say:
As far as learning the basics and the theory of JavaScript goes, this book is a disappointment. You won't be ready to generate your own codes from scratch unless your project is similar to the examples given in the book and require minor revisions. The style of the book is:
To achieve task A, type in code A.
To achieve task B, type in code B, etc..
If you're lucky, what you want to do matches one of the countless example codes in the book. The codes are explained very vaguely. For example in one of the codes, a 'return true' statement appears out of nowhere. The return concept has not been explained in the book, and the authors do not make clear where 'true' is being returned to and what consequences it will have. The explanation they have is: You need the 'return true' statement here to make sure the code will work. So, the book has a cut and paste approach, which rightfully upset some readers. But if you read the 'further reading' section at the end of the book, the authors admit that their book is intended for people who just want a code to work quick, and don't care why it works. I wish they made this clear in the foreword, so readers like me who actually want to learn JavaScript could look elsewhere.
As far as the 'copy this code, and it'll work' approach goes, the book is great. The authors claim that their upcoming book:'JavaScript Advanced Visual Quickstart Guide' will focus on the background of the language. That book may be worth a shot.

The VIsual Quickstart Guide series masterfully achieves what is implied by it's name... it gets you started fast and there are lots of visual references (screenshots and code samples) throughout.

If you're already savvy in JavaScript, the text might be a little too elementary, but it's doubtful that a master at JavaScript would be interested in a book w/ this title to begin with.

Just enough info to accomplish the most commonly desired scripts (alert boxes, image roll-overs, clocks, etc.) without overloading the beginner with too many overwhelming projects that are beyond the scope of an intro to the scripting language.

The book is written equally to Macintosh users as well as Windows users and there are screenshots of JavaScript functions from each platform. It's rare that a mainstream book, especially a relatively inexpensive one, covers both platforms. The book also covers both Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator/Communicator so that the beginner realizes the limitations that the 2 top platforms and 2 top browsers bring into play. This helps beginners from designing scripts that are only viewable with the same configuration that he/she has, unknowingly excluding other viewers.

This book is an apple, not an orange, so don't call it an orange. It's not a comprehensive guide to the esoteric ins and outs of JavaScript. That's what O'Reilly's JavaScript: the Definitive Guide is for. This book --- like all the books in the excellent Visual QuickStart Guide series --- is aimed at getting you into the topic and doing stuff with it quickly. The other books like the O'Reilly book (which would leave a beginner pulling her hair out) are for later.

The examples in this book show you the most common uses of JS and provide sample scripts (which are available for download on the companion web site). The newer, 3d. ed. of the book adds a significant amount of additional information, and is worth the price of admission (I also owned the 2d. ed.). It gets you doing cool stuff with Javascript quickly. That simplicity is its strength and also one of my complaints about it.

The examples are not often very flexible. They do one thing well (which is described quickly and in a manner in which you can easily understand), but its not always easy to modify the script to similar uses. And, because it's how it is, it doesn't teach you enough to understand the theory of the JS you're using, so you rarely understand how to modify those scripts. BUT, as I said above, that's beyond the scope of this book.

One example: in the doing things with windows chapter, there are scripts for opening and closing a second window from within the main window. Great scripts and they work well. But, if you want to open the new window from the main window, then close the new window from the new window (not the main window), too bad, because it doesn't show you how to do that.

But, on that point, I'm starting to lean in the direction of calling this book an orange.

For absolute beginners: it's a must, and is probably the best introduction to JavaScript. For Intermediate JavaScripters, its hit or miss, so check it out thoroughly (though it's still a great quick reference for when you forget something). For advanced JavaScript and JS applications, check out one of the O'reilly reference works.

I am a huge fan of the Visual Quickstart series. They do a wonderful job teaching the basics, whether it be PhotoShop or HTML. Generally, they also provide more than enough information to progress to more in-depth training on a particular subject matter. I can not, however, recommend Javascript for the World Wide Web. I found this book confusing at best, lacking in substance, and poorly ordered with no logical progession in the lessons. This book is great provided all you want is some code to copy onto your page...the codes do work, but it falls short when it comes to providing a basic understanding of the language, it's syntax, and underlying principles. I had much more luck with web-based tutorials. I can not tell you where to look for a good beginning Javascript manual, but I can say that this book isn't it.

JAVASCRIPT FOR THE WORLD WIDE WEB is a good book for teaching Javascript programming to people who have no real interest in learning how to program. As one has probably gathering from surfing the web, there are a lot of Javascript-enabled Web pages put together by people who have absolutely no idea about how to program a script. This book was made for people like that, who have no desire to move beyond Javascript into the world of more advance programming languages (and contains a lot of stuff that would make those badly designed Web pages work a whole lot better). It's a slim volume (252 pages plus appendixes), so you shouldn't be expecting to find very detailed coverage of the language here. It concentrates on the material that the majority of web-page designers are going to be using, so unless you're planning on becoming an expert in Javascript, the information provided here should be more than adequate for anything that you want to do.

Keep in mind that this is a book primarily for beginners to the field. You don't even have to know much HTML, which is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because it forces the book to explain most of the functionality that you will need to know, but a curse because it holds back from dealing with more advanced functions. Hardcore, experienced programmers are not the book's intended audience, so the gaps in its information are not as harmful as they would otherwise be. The subjects that it does cover are explained reasonably well and should be simple enough for most people to understand.

Unfortunately, there are a handful of places where the book assumes the reader to have more knowledge than a beginner would likely have. To an experienced programmer, these omissions would not be the slightest problem, but the book seems to be geared more towards novices. Basic programming concepts like loops and conditionals are mentioned, and briefly explained, but don't provide quite enough elaboration for someone who has never had any experience with such things before. This really only happens in a few isolated areas, but it could probably frustrate a beginner.

The major topics that this book covers are: images, frames, browser windows, cookies, forms, plug-ins, and dynamic Web pages. The book covers other areas as well as providing a basic introduction to basic programming languages that may not be quite in-depth as it should be. It runs the risk of falling between two stools; the advanced user will definitely find this inadequate, but the novice may find a few parts too complicated. Fortunately, gaps in the fundamentals are few and far between. Once the book gets into the heart of its Javascript coverage, the beginning programmer will find lots to learn.

If you just want to know about how to put Javascript bells and whistles on your Web page, then you could do a lot worse than this book. It's far too superficial for the experienced programmer, or for the reader planning on gaining more depth; so if you fall into those categories, then you pay want to purchase something else (I'd recommend O'Reilly's JAVASCRIPT: THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE). But for the subjects that the book does explain, it does a fairly good job. Recommended mainly for novices, but also for intermediates who only have select uses for Web-based Javascript.

I maintain content for a corporate extranet. I have often implemented JavaScript scripts and made some modifications. However, I had never really understood how the scripts worked. I got this book and "Beginning JavaScript" by Paul Wilton, so I could learn the nuts and bolts. After reading this I started to actually understand the scripts I was implementing. I recommend that beginners start by reading the Visual Quickstart (VQ) book and then move onto something more indepth like Wilton's book. VQ is an excellent concise introduction to the basics of JavaScript. It gives a quick explanation of things such as event handlers, methods, properties, functions and loops. You should be able to finish this book in a couple of weeks and have a solid understanding of the basics of JavaScript. However, you will then need something more indepth to truly learn to program complex JavaScripts.

I needed to learn JavaScript fast as a pre-requisite for a training course I was taking in two weeks. This book came through in a big way. It covered the basics quickly, in an easy-to-read style. Downloading the scripts from the accompanying web site was a real time-saver. I didn't waste time copying code. Instead, I played-around with the downloaded scripts and studied how my changes affected the results. I also had the "HTML For The World Wide Web" book on hand. The two books makes a great combo for quick learning. You need to understand what you're buying with this JavaScript book. If you need an in-depth guide or reference book, then this is not it - but then again, it doesn't claim to be. It served my purpose perfectly.