The Book of JavaScript, 2nd Edition: A Practical Guide to Interactive Web Pages (Paperback)

~ Dave Thau! (Author)
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Editorial Reviews

Product Description

The Book of JavaScript teaches readers how to add interactivity, animation, and other tricks to their web sites with JavaScript. Rather than provide a series of cut-and-paste scripts, thau! takes the reader through a series of real world JavaScript code with an emphasis on understanding. Each chapter focuses on a few important JavaScript features, shows how professional web sites incorporate them, and takes readers through examples of how they might add those features to their own web sites. This thoroughly updated 2nd edition includes new chapters on Ajax, revised appendices, and new examples throughout. Summary sections and assignments close each chapter, making the book perfect for use in college courses or independent study.

From the Back Cover

With JavaScript, you can add interactivity, animation, and other tricks to your web pages quickly. But this isn't just a book of scripts for you to cut and paste into your HTML, only to find out later that nothing works as you'd expected. Using real-world examples as the starting point, author thau! walks you step by step through various scripts and explains how they produce the effects you want.

Because no discussion of JavaScript today is complete without coverage of Ajax, this thoroughly updated second edition includes new chapters on Ajax, so you can get up to speed with this valuable method for creating truly dynamic web pages. This second edition of the best-selling The Book of JavaScript also features revised appendices and new examples throughout to reflect today's web environment. Inside, you'll learn to:

* Work with frames, forms, cookies, and alarms
* Use events to react to a user's actions
* Perform image swaps and rollovers
* Program your own functions to produce customized solutions
* Store user preferences and build a shopping cart
* Use Dynamic HTML to turn web pages into multimedia applications

If you need to spruce up tired-looking pages, The Book of JavaScript, 2nd Edition will help take your site from bland to brilliant.

BONUS: Includes a complete reference to all JavaScript objects and functions, including examples, properties, methods, handlers, and browser compatibility!

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Product Details

• Paperback: 528 pages
• Publisher: No Starch Press; 2 edition (December 15, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1593271069
• ISBN-13: 978-1593271060
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.9 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #619,248 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars New book, old stuff, March 8, 2007

By	Brett Merkey (Palm Harbor, FL United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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I use the word "stuff" since this appears to be the author's favorite combining word for variable names. This is not a bad book but it is a re-working of old approaches. Much of the code relies on poor structural HTML. If you are coding Web pages in a modern way then many scripts in the book will not apply.

Two examples should suffice to communicate the age of this material to those with some experience with modern coding:
1) Constant use of the comment trick to "hide from older browsers" which no longer exist in fact. Try using this trick with XHTML and see what happens...

2) Constant use of "document.write". Anyone using that nowadays for routine transformations of the page is severely limiting those possibilities.

There are better books out there. See my other reviews for some good ones.

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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best book on JavaScript out there, January 8, 2007

By	Lenore Mohammadian (San Diego, CA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Thau did it again! The second edition is even better than the first:
all the good real world examples, tips for giving fussy browsers "what
they want," a really handy reference, plus over a hundred new pages on
AJAX--Asynchronous JavaScript and XML--all the rage these days, it
seems, and the "magic" behind Google maps and the photo-sharing
interface of Flickr.

I felt great satisfaction when I wrote my first AJAX application--a
shared to do list--with the help of this book. I got up and running in
almost no time. I appreciated all the extras, too, like how to set up
a webserver and PHP.

The book is beautifully laid out and easy to use. Each chapter begins
with a set of bullet points that succinctly summarize the content
covered. The material is also presented in a logical way, so that I
always had the background I needed when new concepts were introduced
(or I could easily thumb back and refresh my memory). I highly
recommend The Book of Javascript, take 2!

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good first read--but watch out for the textual errors!, May 6, 2007

By	Thom Straight - See all my reviews

This book seems to be written for someone almost entirely new to programming/scripting. A good deal of the concepts are explained just as thoroughly as they need to be for him to cover the subject he is covering.

As such, I would not recommend this book for someone already experienced in programming/scripting.

In response to some other posts, which criticize him for teaching document.write instead of the more modern approach (working directly with the DOM), I disagree. I do acknowledge that it is better to work directly with the DOM, but that is far from a concept that can be taught to someone completely new to programming/scripting without boggling their mind.

Also: BEWARE THE ERRORS! This book is chock full of errors in the code snippets they display. The error in the numbered snippet on page 36, probably the 3rd or 4th error I've seen so far, is what actually motivated me to write this review. That in mind, if you're paying attention, the errors can actually be turned to an educational purpose--debugging! :)

Final advice: If you're completely new to this field or want to treat yourself as if you're completely new, then get this book. I would not recommend sticking solely with this book, though. Get this book and some others (JavaScript: The Definitive Guide and probably another instructional book such as one of the WROX Javascript books).