Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent practical introduction., December 30, 2006
The audience for this book is beginning/novice web developers with a knowledge of HTML but not of JavaScript. The book begins with an introduction to basic JavaScript language features and then proceeds to work through a number of examples according to category (images, frames, browser windows, forms, regular expressions and strings, user events, and cookies). After, there are two chapters on AJAX fundamentals.
The book does not claim to be an in-depth resource. The general purpose of the QuickStart series of books is to provide an overview of the main concepts and practices in use by web developers today. It is meant to be a STARTING POINT to introduce novices to technologies, not as an in-depth reference. The authors of this and other QuickStart books point this out continually, yet still get bad reviews from people who have not taken the time to read about the purposes of various series from technical publishers. This is unfortunate for the public as well as unfair to the authors.
A previous reviewer mentioned what he took to be atrocious coverage of Ajax. The book contains two chapters exclusively covering Ajax. The first covers the fundamental techniques used to take advantage of this combination of technologies. The second chapter explores some of the popular Ajax toolkits currently available. This is consistent with the purpose of the book. Some readers may be interested in heading down the development path, yet others may be more interested in design and in using pre-existing tools. This book caters to both and has no intention of deceiving either reader.
The following quote is a good example of this. It is an excerpt from the title page of Chapter 16, which follows the introductory chapter (basic XMLHttpRequest usage, etc.) and precedes the Ajax toolkit chapter:
"[Writing] Ajax applications can be difficult. They often require a great deal of knowledge of working with the DOM, CSS, JavaScript, and server resources. Since this is a book for beginning scripters, we've shown you how to do some easy things with Ajax, so you can see that learning Ajax techniques is well within your reach. But many books have been written that are completely devoted to showing intermediate-to-advanced scripters how to create Ajax applications, and our Ajax chapters are no substitute for that kind of in-depth exploration."
As for the dual-column formatting that some reviewers disliked, it is consistent with the formatting of the entire QuickStart series, as well as the QuickPro series of the same publisher. The format is nice for tackling specific techniques in a concise amount of space. It is not as abstractly engaging as conventional technical books, but it is not meant to be. The format is excellent for explaining techniques (especial design techniques) as well as for conveying a sense of quick forward momentum.
I've only recently started reading books from Peachpit Press, and I will turn to them before I turn anywhere else. I am a web developer who has been doing light programming for the last several years. I like these books because they get me up to speed quickly, and act as a comprehensive starting point, allowing me to understand "where I need to go from here."
This book is excellent as a broad introduction with lots of real-world examples. If you're a novice web developer with a decent grasp of HTML wishing for a comprehensive introduction to JavaScript and practical JavaScript techniques, this is the book for you.
However, if you're well-grounded and are looking for more in-depth coverage of JavaScript and Ajax techniques, "Professional JavaScript for Web Developers" (Nicholas Zakas / Wrox Press) and "Professional Ajax" (Zakas, et. al. / Wrox Press) are excellent in-depth resources geared toward real-world professional development, and both are among the best peer-reviewed titles in existence on these subjects.
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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great starter JavaScript book, January 5, 2007
This is the sixth editing of the Visual QuickStart Guide to this book and it is the best so far. It finally focuses on some of the WSC standard DOM practices that all the other new JavaScript books have been showing the past year. It also has some a great chapter on one of the most popular JavaScript library/toolkits: Yahoo! UI. This library by Yahoo! has tons of ways to help you create quickly a JavaScript and/or Ajax widget/application for your own site.
This book is a great beginner book for people trying to get into coding or programming since all you need is a web browser and no fancy compiler or other costly program. The book goes though the basics of JavaScript with creating variables and where to put your scripts. The author shows you some simple examples to get you started. It then focuses on more language basics such as loops, if statements, creating custom functions, and arrays. It gives a simple examples for each topic and then builds a small application with each new topic covered to show the reader how they all can be put together. I really like how the author does this because it shows the reader what can be done with JavaScript instead of just explaining each topic and moving on.
The book then covers manipulating images with JavaScript since doing image-rollovers is what got JavaScript noticed years ago. Then the bigger chapters focus on handling forms which the other big use of JavaScript for years. Being able to manipulate data in forms as well as validate that data is crucial for understanding some of the power of JavaScript. The book also has a good section in Chapter 8, with forms and regular expressions. Using regular expressions can be very tricky but he book gives some good examples on how to use them with some of the built-in JavaScript objects (string) to validate specific patterns of form data (ie. email address).
Towards the end of the book (chapter 9 and 10), the author covers basic event handling (onload, onmouseover, onmouseout, onfocus, onblur, onkeypress, etc) and creating and editing cookies. These two topics have been around for years in JavaScript, but are an important topic(s) if you want to learn additional JavaScript topics.
The rest of the book covers most of the new additions for this 6th version: DOM, JSON (JavaScript Object Notation), Ajax, Ajax toolkits (Yahoo! UI), Bookmarlets (small scripts stored in browser favorites - IE7 may not work because of updated security). Each topic is covered in enough detail to give the reader a good basics understanding of some of the more advanced topics that are used today.
After this book, you can progress to more JavaScript books focusing on DOM or JavaScript Libraries or Ajax.
This is a great first book on JavaScript for someone new to programming or coding. Whether you're a graphic designer or just a internet newbie wanted to get started.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
It lives up to the VQP series perfectly, November 17, 2006
While this is not the book to use if you've never even attempted programming, if you have at least moderate experience, Dori and Tom's latest revision will get you moving in the JS/Ajax world quite quickly. As a sysadmin running everything but AS/400s at the moment, I am more than a little appreciative that they tested out the book's code on as many browsers and platforms as they did.
It's not the Ultimate Tome Of Javascript Knowledge, but it's not supposed to be. Nor is it going to tell you how to do everything. But what it will do, and by design, is get you pointed in the right direction , and give you the basic skills and knowledge you need to get down to business quickly.
I will agree that some of the pagination is suboptimal, but that's Peachpit's problem, and at least to me, didn't detract, and doesn't detract from the book's ability to get me from 0 to 60 in a short amount of time.
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