Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
As others have noticed, not the greatest book, May 9, 2008
Perhaps due to the presence of coauthor Frank Canovatchel, there is slightly more clarity of thought and rigor applied to program logic presentation than in the other Carey book I reviewed (XML).
However, I have to agree that the Review exercises at the end of each tutorial (I'm at Chap 04) tend to leave out critical information that doing the chapter tutorial should have taught. It doesn't.
And to make matters worse, the index is incomplete. A pet peeve of mine is text books where you can't find information you either thought you read [and want to review] or want to know if it is somewhere in the book you plan to read [but haven't read yet].
Case in point: Review exercise of Tutorial 4, Step 5 says "Use the getObject() function to create three variables..." but the closest thing to a "getObject()" function mentioned in the chapter (or the book as far as I can tell) is the getElementById() which does not appear to be what is intended in this exercise. To make matters worse, the index does not list a getObject() function. Googling online revealed numerous tangentially related topics, mostly appearing to do with Microsoft and VB. So....one simple missing step and the exercise is dead in the water. Very typical of Thomson Course Technology textbooks I might add.
So two stars because the chapter tutorials proper can usually be copied line for line (legal transcriptionist style) and will often work (not always, for example Chapter 03 tutorial created a opening HTML table tag and never ended it. Makes me wonder how well the code was tested.). No more stars because the end of chapter exercises are only moderately clear and tend to require that you somehow intuit exactly what logic the author had in mind at the time he was writing, and book is nearly useless as a reference to find more data. It is not for loss of words. The author writes like he is paid by the word. The exact same code is repeated three times in consecutive order but slightly different text formatting (for reasons known only to the author or publisher) and the verbosity of writing style would make a politician green with envy - yet seldom does it clearly and categorically really 'say' anything. Definitely not K & R.
Lastly, the text mentions color in several places. For example, p. 172 states "In the figure, object names are highlighted in red, methods are displayed in blue, and parameter values are diplayed in green". I need not state the obvious: The book is printed in black and white. Obviously, a printing decision was made after the text was written and nobody bothered to proof for mention of color. Not to mention the resulting loss of information.
I only bought this book because it was required for a class - I previously had the displeasure of another Carey/Thomson Course Technology book [XML] and know better than to buy one voluntarily.
[btw, It doesn't help that IE7 javascript debugger gives clues about as illuminating as tea leaves. "Expected object, line 54, 1" - which is perfectly good, only said object is a container for all the code written in the exercise....well now that really narrows things down!!! :-( ]
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Dated, though ok, intro to Javascript, November 12, 2007
This book says Copyright 2006, and looks like it was released in late 2005. However, judging by the discussions on browsers and the lack of any mention of the latest uses of Javascript (Web 2.0, Ajax, etc) this book seems more like it was written in 2003. It mentions version 4 browsers all over the book. Makes no mention of Firefox or Safari, and does not discuss versions of IE and Netscape that were out even in 2005.
The Chapters, called Tutorials, are overall pretty good at explaining the topics. However, there are at times where they aren't really explaining "why" you're doing something, just showing you how to do it. This approach is not very educational.
Another complaint was in the wasted half chapter on using "filters" that only work in IE. I'm taking a class that is using the book. After going over these topics, the instructor took a vote on how many (out of 30 people) found these IE only parts helpful...about 3 people thought so. Most people, me included, felt it was a waste of time. Most of the IE filters can be done with other technologies that are cross-browser compatible, making it pretty bad practice to use them at all. So, here, the author just wasted space - and class time.
I can't compare this to any other Javascript books, but I can compare it to there computer books. It's just OK. I'm sure there are better books out there that cover more timely topics, include discussions of the latest browsers (even for 2005!), don't waste time on teaching proprietary technologies (IE filters), and cover topics that explains more of the "whys" rather that just "hows".
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Decent tutorials, October 6, 2007
The tutorials in the book are written well, but the exercises are just too confusing! They want you to take everything from previous chapters and incorporate it to write new code. They expect you to build new ideas based of what you just reviewed. The case exercises do not follow the tutorial. I find this extremely difficult for beginners and time consuming. Be prepared to research Javascript on the net and other books along with this one.
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