Customer Reviews

Scriptin' with JavaScript and Ajax: A Designer's Guide (Voices That Matter)

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I'm an experienced programmer, but fairly new to JavaScript.

I liked how the book didn't get stuck on the basics and jumped quickly into real examples of applying JavaScript to enhance a website.

However, as more code appeared on the pages, so did a lot more mistakes. A number of these seemed to be the result of going through several revisions and not updating all references to the code being discussed, but many were pretty inexcusable such as:

- Glaring syntax errors
- Inconsistent names / referencing functions or objects that don't exist
- Incomplete / non-functional code in places

I was able to get something out of this book and didn't get stumped by many of these mistakes (although there were certainly some WTF moments), but I kept imagining a poor novice programmer getting totally confused by parts of the text. There were also some bad practices demonstrated in places. The number of errors is severe enough that I wouldn't recommend this book to friends or colleagues.

Scriptin' with JavaScript and Ajax is written by Charles Wyke-Smith who is also the author of Stylin' with CSS which is one of the best CSS books I've read. This is a great book for new and seasoned web designers alike. He does a great job of explaining the basic programming fundamentals of JavaScript so that even a newbie can grasp the concepts of JavaScript and similar programming languages.

There are only seven well thought out chapters that present the concepts of JavaScript in easily digestible chunks with a logical flow. You will learn about the rise of JavaScript, the basics, objects and the DOM, events, Ajax, and the major JavaScript frameworks that make the language fun and easy to learn. Before you are through, Charles presents instructions for creating two simple JS powered web applications.

Charles discusses JavaScript's rise to popularity on the web and the fact that it's the only programming language that runs in the browser. He covers accessibility and progressive enhancement, discussing building websites in three layers. The first layer, the plain HTML with the server technology such as PHP. The second layer, making it look good with CSS styles in an external stylesheet. Finally the third layer, enhancing the experience with JavaScript and using Ajax to make sites that can retrieve data from the server without refreshing the page.

The basics of JavaScript programming are explained in a concise introduction discussing variables, strings, evaluations, booleans, and arrays. Arrays are further dissected with techniques to add, read, and sort elements in an array. He also discusses associative arrays. I have read many programming books and taken classes and his explanations of programming basics were a great refresher and helped cement the concepts. Charles talks about using code to work with data. He explains operators, concatenation, and decision statements like switches and loops. There is a great explanation of how functions work and variable's scope. Passing anonymous functions as variables and calling functions from links is also show. The book does a really great job of explaining common programming characteristics in a clear, understandable way.

Objects, named collections of variables and functions, are explained. He discusses accessing an object's properties and methods with the dot sequence: objectName.aPropertyOfTheObject; objectName.aMethodOfTheObject();. Everything in JavaScript is an object and there are two types: predefined and user-defined. Charles talks about object literals, comma separated lists of properties and methods. He discusses how objects are great to organize code into tasks the application performs. This chapter has a good diagram to explain how objects work. The DOM is explained and how to use it with JavaScript to modify any part of the document's HTML and styles.

The chapter focused on events shows how to use JavaScript to add feedback and interactivity when the user operates the mouse and keyboard to interact with the web site. It shows a technique to create striped tables with rollover effects and how to change text on a page based on the amount of characters keyed in.

There is a chapter devoted to Ajax where Charles walks through building an Ajax powered guitar catalog and even makes it accessible. Another cool part of the chapter is where he shows how to store the data for the guitar catalog in JSON and then in XML format. This is great to see the differences between the two.

In the chapter on frameworks, Charles discusses the advantages and disadvantages of using frameworks, the major four being YUI, Prototype, jQuery, and Adobe Spry. He explains namespacing and why it's important that frameworks use it to prevent variables of the same name from colliding with each other when multiple frameworks are used. The great thing about this chapter is that he shows how to accomplish the same task in four different frameworks. This shows the differences in size of code and will help you make a decision about what framework to learn. Rich Internet Application components are shown created in the different frameworks so you can see how they each accomplish the same function in their own way.

In the last chapter you build two applications that combine everything learned from the previous chapters into real work examples. The first application is a horizontal scrolling image carousel with an overlay view of the images when clicked. The second is a location finder with AutoComplete built into the search box. The AutoComplete application uses maps with the Yahoo! API. He also shows how to use a jQuery plugin to set rounded corners on the carousel application.

Scriptin' with JavaScript and Ajax is a great addition to the collection of web design books written by Charles Wyke-Smith and will fit nicely into any web designers library. It's a medium-sized, easy read that is not dry, long, or boring. It makes great use of color and diagrams when displaying the code examples. The code samples are available on the book's site and will be useful in your next web projects. I highly recommend the book!

I had preordered this book after reading the author's two previous guides (Stylin' with CSS: A Designer's Guide (2nd Edition) and Codin' for the Web: A Designer's Guide to Developing Dynamic Web Sites), and this book is a great addition to the series. It gives a great overview of JavaScript and Ajax. The writing style is engaging and approachable, and the examples build on themselves in the same way that a program would be written, with more functionality added in increments, so that the end result is not only a program that works but one that the reader can understand and reuse.

Aside from being able to learn a new technology, I was able to easily justify the cost of the book by being able to use the code examples (Zebra Tables and Carousel) in my current projects. They are presented in such a way that it's easy to modify and integrate them, because you see them built from the ground up rather than just appearing as a monolithic program.

I appreciated the section on frameworks, demonstrating how to accomplish the same task with four different tools. It's a good jumping-off place for more research, and there are pointers given in the margins to useful sites and references. The accompanying website is also a great reference for examples and downloadable code.

This is not a JavaScript or Ajax reference, nor does it try to be. Rather, it guides you to a point where you can understand how to use these technologies in your own work. If you're already a JavaScript/Ajax expert, you might want something else. For me, this book met its objective of developing practical skills, and gives me a good foundation on which to build.

I have used a previous book by Charles Wyke-Smith, Codin' for the Web, and was excited to see that he was coming out with one on Javascript/Ajax. You'll notice that his books are a lot thinner than other books aimed at beginners. He distills lessons down to essentials and manages to present concepts in ways that are more accessible to noobs.

I've done some javascript, but haven't learned it in a systematic way, and his books simplify syntax so that those of us who haven't programmed since basic or pascal back in the 80s, or perhaps those who have never programmed at all, can get our heads around these concepts.

The prose is easy to read and the examples -- unlike so many other books of this sort -- are clearly explained.
Often I've had trouble relating the examples used in programming books to projects that I am working on. Somehow Wyke-Smith explains things well enough so you can understand how to break your own projects down into the requisite parts.

This book includes discussion of jquery, and the relationships between server-side languages, web interfaces, etc.

All in all, very useful and helpful.

Excellent book! Charles cuts to the chase with real world examples, plus 2 good projects at the end. The strength of the book is that the content is broken down to a level I haven't seen before, thus making it easier to understand.

I found this book to be excellent in bring Javascript together. The Author used a project to teach javascript and including simple modular approach to create and debug. This book is perfect for the beginner that also has server space to host their website. HTML.CSS.PHP.Javascript were brought together nicely and understandable. Highly recommended as a new builders aid.

There are lots of JavaScript and AJAX books out there now, but few really combine both skills into one book. A few books that do, are huge books (700+ pages) and really are impossible to read through and actually get through all the 'techo-jargen' to really get anything out of the book. Most people need a easy-to-understand, to the point with real-world examples book.

This book by Charles Wyke-Smith is the book you are looking for if you want to quickly get started learning JavaScript with all the latest features (including libraries) and how to incorportate AJAX features as well. Since AJAX is not a separate technology, but incorporate sepecific JavaScript objects to create AJAX-enabled websites.

The author assumes no previous JavaScript experience and goes through the basics of JavaScript covering variables, if statements, loops, arrays and how objects/classes work. Then the author goes into explaining the DOM works in modifying and referencing HTML elements of a web page as well as modifying CSS styles of elements (and child elements) of a page. This of course is the foundation of how to use AJAX properly and explained very nicely by the author will great examples to get anybody up and running easily.

The author then goes into explaining JavaScript events inrelation to how they affect an HTML page with window and mouse and keyboard events. The author also covers the Event object in talking about event delegation and working with the DOM in creating some complex JavaScript examples.

Then various JavaScript libraries such as jQuery, Adobe Spry, Protype are explained with some really cool examples of using multuiple libraries together which is very unique for most JavaScript books.

Finally, the author very nicely explains how the objects that work with AJAX work and how to create some really useful AJAX web pages with PHP.

Lots of good stuff to learn from this book and the author does a fabulous job doing it a relatively short book (300 pages).

A great book and worth buying if you want to learn JavaScript and AJAX the proper way!!!