Professional JavaScript for Web Developers (Wrox Programmer to Programmer) (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

Product Description

This eagerly anticipated update to the breakout book on JavaScript offers you an in-depth look at the numerous advances to the techniques and technology of the JavaScript language. You'll see why JavaScript's popularity continues to grow while you delve through topics such as debugging tools in Microsoft Visual Studio, FireBug, and Drosera; client-side data storage with cookies, DOM storage, and client-side databases; HTML 5, ECMAScript 3.1, the Selectors API; and design patterns including creational, structural, and behavorial patterns.

From the Back Cover

Professional JavaScript® for Web Developers, 2nd Edition

If you want to achieve JavaScript's full potential, it is critical to understand its nature, history, and limitations. This book sets the stage by covering JavaScript from its very beginning to the present-day incarnations that include support for the DOM and Ajax. It also shows you how to extend this powerful language to meet specific needs and create seamless client-server communication without intermediaries such as Java or hidden frames.

You'll explore basic concepts of JavaScript including its version of object-oriented programming, inheritance, and its use in HTML and XHTML. A detailed discussion of the components that make up a JavaScript implementation follows, with specific focus on standards such as ECMAScript and DOM. All three levels of DOM are explained, including advanced topics such as event simulation, XML parsing, and XPath queries. You'll also learn how to utilize regular expressions and build dynamic user interfaces. This valuable insight will help you apply JavaScript solutions to the business problems faced by Web developers everywhere.

What you will learn from this book

• All of the details regarding JavaScript's built-in reference types

• How to use object-oriented programming in JavaScript

• Ways to detect the client machine and its capabilities

• Debugging tools and techniques for each browser

• Steps for reading and manipulating XML data

• How to create a custom event framework

• Various techniques for storing data on the client machine

• Approaches to working with JavaScript in an enterprise environment

Who this book is for

This book is for Web developers who want to use JavaScript to dramatically improve the usability of their Web sites and Web applications and for those with programming experience, especially object-oriented programming experience.

Wrox Professional guides are planned and written by working programmers to meet the real-world needs of programmers, developers, and IT professionals. Focused and relevant, they address the issues technology professionals face every day. They provide examples, practical solutions, and expert education in new technologies, all designed to help programmers do a better job.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 840 pages
• Publisher: Wrox; 2 edition (January 14, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 047022780X
• ISBN-13: 978-0470227800
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.4 x 2.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (47 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #30,626 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars For Intermediate and Advanced Programmers, May 16, 2005

By	John Matlock "Gunny" (Winnemucca, NV) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Professional JavaScript for Web Developers (Wrox Professional Guides) (Paperback)

The key to knowing about this book is the word "Professional" in the title. There are other books aimed at the complete beginner that will start off with a much simpler "Here's How" approach to get you started. This book instead starts off with the history, the basic ECMAScript standards and a discussion on the Object nature of JavaScript. It's written by a working programmer to fill the real world needs of other working programmers. It does this job very well.

Further, the book is new and up to date. JavaScript is an evolving language as the web grows to demand increasing capabilities. Some of these features that now get full chapters in this book include: XML, Client-Server communications, Web Services, interacting with Plug-Ins.

The last chapter talks about the next step in the development of JavaScript, with cautions that this material is still preliminary and subject to change.

Excellent book for the intermediate to advanced JavaScript programmer.

31 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The most current coverage of JavaScript to date, June 6, 2005

By	Foti Massimo (Vezia (Switzerland)) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Professional JavaScript for Web Developers (Wrox Professional Guides) (Paperback)

Many poor quality books on this topic had been published along the years, helping JavaScript into becoming the less understood programming languages of all time. It's nice to see how finally there is another JavaScript book worth reading apart from the classic titles by Goodman and Flanagan. The book is not aimed at beginners; you either have some solid JavaScript knowledge or a decent programming experience with other languages. Compared to other titles this stands out for the chapters covering modern techniques: DOM, Client-Server Communication, XML/XSLT, and Web Services. I would say it's the most current coverage of JavaScript to date. In my own opinion, only some poor editing and organisation prevent it from reaching five stars.

21 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Handle with extreme care, July 16, 2007

By	Cecil Ward "Cecil Ward" - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Professional JavaScript for Web Developers (Wrox Professional Guides) (Paperback)

I have enormous problems with this dated, confused and 'gappy' book, and advise would be readers to exercise _extreme_ caution with it, particularly with the examples, a great number of which are a long, long way from currently accepted best practice.

I don't believe that "Programmer to Programmer" describes this book well. The author's confusing and patchy descriptions of language fundamentals are not useful to those readers who are highly experienced in other programming languages such as C or C++. Neither does it seem that the author has clearly identified the target reader, as I imagine that the book will bewilder some beginners too. For example, for reasons unknown the author seemed to feel the need to embark on a "fundamentals of OOP" tutorial, a subject quite inappropriate for a "programmer-to-programmer" text as it should be taken as read, and one which is in any case too large to be adequately covered in a few pages. I imagine this may merely succeed in confusing novice programmers, who really do need to consult a proper introduction elsewhere. And why on earth did the author feel that a quick descent into UML was appropriate at the start of the third chapter? Another short section is devoted to explaining bit pattern operations, a subject that is arguably best left to real textbooks on programming fundamentals for beginners. At the same time, in many, many cases discussions of basic topics that experienced programmers would expect to find are simply absent. Javascript is in many ways highly unusual as a programming language, and because of the familiar syntax, C, C++ or Java programmers may be initially led to believe that its behaviour will be close to their expectations, yet this is not the case. For this reason it is crucial for a reference text to take care to tick off these crucial language-conversion issues properly.

Returning to the code examples, I have many problems with their poor quality. A sizeable number do not conform to current "unobtrusive" best practise. I can understand why this might have been done for reasons of brevity, but that doesn't excuse the poor example this sets. There is no discussion of accessibility, which is unforgiveable. And some of examples feature outdated, broken or deprecated techniques. The discussion of hacks to bolster up browser support for addEventListener, for example. Browser-sniffing, a deprecated technique features far too much, indeed a worrying number of examples rely on it. The author of this review is nowhere near competent to comment in detail on the quality of every code example, but the poor techniques clearly visible in some have the effect of casting doubt on the whole.

Despite being published in 2005, the book is simply too old to cover the recent tidal wave of high quality libraries which are now available, and which properly deal with some of the most difficult issues in basic javascript development, issues which this book simply does not acknowledge. The book deserves criticism for being yet one more contributor to the vast amount of poor quality javascript code on the web, yet of course it has to be said that any paper book will inevitable be vulnerable to the problem of obsolescence, since javascript support in browsers is so poor currently and techniques are changing rapidly right now.

This review is unapologetically harsh, yet I am not going to say "do not buy this book" outright. Although dated and harmful for beginners, there is a lot of material in this book, and for very experienced programmers in other programming languages who are forewarned about the book's unreliability it will at least give some idea of the issues and will provide a starting point for gathering a list of topics to be researched. But many readers may be simply better off consulting the blogs of the various acknowledged javascript gurus instead. Reading Brendan Eich's own articles would be a start.