Customer Reviews

Murach's JavaScript and DOM Scripting (Murach: Training & Reference)

5 star:		(24)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I've read a ton of books on JavaScript, and Ray Harris' wonderful tome is perhaps THE best modern titles you'll find on the topic. The book is intelligently organized, and written in a concise fashion, with practical examples, delivered with a friendly voice that makes what can often be convoluted or confusing concepts easy to grasp for beginners.

On that note, the book serves as a valuable refresher for the experienced web developer wanting to get up to speed on current-day concepts or the advanced dev needing best practices in her coding. And like all Murach titles, the book doesn't inundate the reader with useless chapters of the history of the at-hand topic, it just tells you what JavaScript can do for your web applications and shows you the best, most efficient ways to do it.

In particular, I found Harris' work to have exceptional contributions of several topics: there is excellent coverage of debugging tools & techniques, featuring the latest browsers, plugins, and GUIs. The book has a wonderful discussion of how to use client-side regular expressions. And the chapters on object-oriented programming and DOM scripting are some of the best you'll find. Likewise appreciated are the discussions on JavaScript libraries such as jQuery and Dojo.

It's truly a holistic look at client-side development.

So Get out and buy this book...whatever your level, it'll be a welcome addition to your technical library!

If you are new to web design or an old pro like me this book is a must have in my opinion. I love how it starts out with the basics like XHTML and CSS then moves on to the good stuff.

Each chapter is full of examples and sample code showing you how to do the most common techniques that you will face as a web developer/designer. I really liked the DOM scripting sections and how to manipulate the DOM on the fly. Learning object coding is so important and is key if you want to really be good at Javascript. It was cool to see the sections on JQuery and DOJO since I'm staring to use these libraries heavily on my sites.

I feel it's so important to understand not only how to build nice looking sites but to know how to code them for speed and browser compatibility. This book covers these essentials and even walks you through Firebug and how to use it to identify problem areas in your web applications. I have not seen a better book on the subject and I hope you learn just as much as I did from it. This one will be on my desk for a while!

I bought this item on Amazon after reading all the glowing reviews, but now that I've read all 20 chapters, I have to say that I'm disappointed with this book.

First of all, I'm not a first-time programmer. I'm a sophomore in college and I'm getting three degrees: Math, Computer Science, and Economics. I have a 4.0. I don't say this to brag; I say it to show that I know my way around a good textbook, and I know my way around programming. I've taken several programming classes in college using C++, and this summer I have a software engineering internship with a company in Kansas City. This company said I might need to use JavaScript on the job, so I bought this book to have a foundation in the language.

The format of the book is easy to read. If you open to almost any page in the book, you will see that the right-hand page has examples of JavaScript and/or XHTML code, and the left-hand page has text explaining the code on the right-hand page. A few chapters into the book, I found myself looking at the code on the right side, then reading the left page if I didn't understand the code. If all the code made sense, I still went back and read the left side to reinforce the concept in my memory. Again, this worked very well for me, and apparently many people like this style that is found in all of Murach's books.

However, there are times when it seems like the text on the left is being forced. For example, in Chapter 17, after the reader should be well acquainted with JavaScript, a paragraph on the left says, "That means that the compareColumnValues function compares the values in the current sort column and returns the appropriate number. To do that, this function gets the values that are stored in the current sort column, compares them, and returns the appropriate number." This sort of wordiness and repetition is commonplace throughout the book. I feel like the author is constrained by the format. When the code on the right is easy to understand, you run into paragraphs like the one quoted above, which are long and repetitive, but when the code on the right is somewhat complex, you often find that legitimate questions about the code go unanswered.

Sometimes you will run into a piece of code used on the right-hand page that you haven't seen before, but the paragraphs on the left won't address the code at all. Most of the time, these pieces of code are addressed later in the book, but often not for several more chapters. This happens quite often during the first half of the book, but even the second half can't seem to break this bad habit. In Chapter 14, p. 518, the author presents a library to work with keyboard events. In this library, the OR operator is used to assign a value from a group of values by selecting the one that is defined. In Chapter 18, p. 641, this usage of the OR operator is explained for the first time. In this instance, the OR operator is listed in the index, so you can look ahead to page 641 and confirm that you are understanding its usage correctly. Unfortunately, the index does not contain every JavaScript function presented in the book, so sometimes you just have to wait for the answer to come (or not to come).

On top of all this, the book has several typos and some straight up factual errors. One extremely important function, the parseInt function, is presented in Chapter 2. The book tells you, "The parseInt method converts the string that's passed to it to an integer data type. Returns NaN if the string can't be converted to a valid number." What it doesn't tell you is that if the first digit of the number passed to it is 0, it returns the number in octal. This will always happen unless you specify in the second parameter of the parseInt function the radix (or base) of the number it should return. Also, parseInt("892F77") will return 892, not NaN, since the string starts with a number. When I was doing one of the examples in the book, I ran into these problems and would never have figured them out had I not looked up the answers on the Internet. I should not have to resort to Google to answer my JavaScript questions when I have a JavaScript book right in front of me.

One last thing I should mention about this book is that you really should have a computer handy when reading it, and you need to download the files from the Murach website as described in the Appendix. I would say a third of the book is spent reviewing the code for these applications, and at the end of each chapter, there are exercises that can only be done with those downloadable applications. However, I should hope that anyone reading this book would have access to a computer and Internet, since this book is all about programming Internet applications. That being said, the applications are good. I like seeing examples of how to use my new-found knowledge. However, the most the exercises ever ask you to do is to modify the applications. I wish the book would also suggest applications to make from scratch, perhaps with downloadable solutions.

All in all, I learned a lot from this book, though I don't think it goes into enough depth, and its presentation is just plain scattered. As someone who wants to thoroughly know my way around JavaScript, I feel like I didn't get what I was looking for. I certainly don't feel like I reached an "expert level" as the book said I would. I want to know the ins and outs of every function so I don't find myself scratching my head over an error and scouring the sands of Google for the answer (curse you, parseInt!). But at the same time, if I had been a new programmer I would have been overwhelmed for the first six chapters or so. So I really can only recommend this book for people who have some programming experience and want to learn JavaScript, but don't care about all the details. Even for those people though, the order of presentation is really wacky.

If you need to know how to add your special dynamic idea to a Web or server application
Then, this is the book for you.

From "Entry level" to "Accomplished" scripting!.
Plenty of real world applications to practice with and to later draw from.

The scripting is made remarkably easy to learn and hands on fortifies retention.

Murach books, have a well proven "Hands On" technique
that works very well, it did for me.

I have bought other murach books and was never disappointed.

javascript and dom scripting, made easy, right here, right now.

You'll be happy you bought the book!

I'll try to keep this short. I have finished reading this book all the way through. It's a thick book (~750 pages of to-read content at 8 inches by 10 inches), so it took me a while. I would consider myself an intermediate JavaScript developer. I have experience with the JavaScript basics and some of the advanced stuff. I also have a background in Python. I found myself breezing through the first half of this book. However, the second half took me a while longer because the content began to push my limitations. I found this book to be an invaluable guide to assist me in learning to overcome those limitations. I am very impressed with how this book presents the material in a friendly, yet well educated manner. By the time I finished reading this book, I was able to understand and use the more advanced techniques in my JavaScript projects. In my humble opinion, I wouldn't recommend this as the only book for an absolute beginner. It would help to have a second take on the JavaScript techniques covered in this book (I recommend JavaScript, A Beginner's Guide, 3rd ed., by John Pollock). Overall, you will not go wrong with this book. If you are eager to learn JavaScript and want a great training and reference book, look no further.

This is the JavaScript book that you will primarily use. Here's why:

1) You can use this book as a tutorial to get you going, and then later
on, use the same book as a reference. Some books are either one or the
other, but this book is both.

2) This book does not teach JavaScript as a stand-alone course, but
rather shows how JavaScript works with the other web technologies such
as CSS, XHTML, AJAX, and DOM Scripting.

3) For those of you who are starting out in JavaScript, this book will
have you coding your first business applications in a short time. The
first applications are the Future Value Calculator and the Sales Tax
Calculator. For those with little or no experience in programming, this
book introduces the newbie to "if statements", variables, loops,
functions, and arrays.

4) If you are a more advanced programmer, this book explains advanced
features, such as drop-down menus, applications that run slide shows,
headline rotation, image rollovers, data sorting in a table, 3-D image
rotation, advanced techniques in using JavaScript libraries, and more.
In short, there are topics in this book that you won't find anywhere
else.

To summarize: this book is quite versatile as both a tutorial and a
reference book. It can benefit both the inexperienced programmer as
well as the professional programmer.

Finally, an essential characteristic of this book, as well as the other
Murach books, is that the examples, programs, and applications are all
thoroughly tested. Therefore, you don't have to worry that the code
that you pick to use will not work.

This book will work WONDERFULLY to help you build better and more robust
websites!

I bought this book after suffering through the Head First JavaScript book. This book explains clearly and introduces concepts prior to the exercises. I can actually code in JavaScript after reading this book and doing the exercises which is something I couldn't do after Head First.

I am a graphic artist doing web development, I'm not a programmer. Fortunately for me, and any of you out there who are like me, Ray Harris wrote this book. He speaks every-day English and doesn't assume you know too much. His text is very clear and strait forward. This book has given me the technical knowledge I need to create dynamic web sites and understand the DOM and Object Oriented programing. It has also prepared me to take on other internet development languages like PHP, perl, and MYSQL.

I highly recommend this book.

There is plenty of information to be learned in this book. Consider yourself warned, if you are a beginner with JavaScript and DOM Scripting, it will take some serious hours to finish the tasks that accompany each chapter. Unless you are serious about learning this, you will soon move on to something else and your copy of this book will find a spot on your shelf within a couple of short weeks.

The major problem that I have with this book is that I do not have the answers to the questions. Especially for the beginner, if you cannot finish the problems it is nice to be able to reference the answers so you can see how it is done correctly.

I am finishing the problems but it is taking me a considerable amount of time to do so. Not having the answers really has me stumped. Considering that in order to get the scripts necessary to do the probs you must download them from Murach's website anyway, wouldn't it make sense to include the correct way to implement the answers?

Anyway, that is the reason that I only gave it four stars and not five.

There are a ton of five star reviews for this book. More than any other Javascript book that I could find on Amazon for sure. That's why I bought it. I have a limited programming background so I understand all the concepts and what I'm being taught relatively well. But the book does not cover the material well enough for you to complete the exercises at the end of the chapters. I got up to Chapter 6 and looked at the exercises and said to myself, "I wasn't taught how to do that." Since then it's been taking up space on my bookshelf. It's like they teach you how to hammer a nail into wood and then ask you to build a house at the end.