Amazon.com: Customer Reviews: JavaScript and JQuery: Interactive Front-End Web Development

Top positive review

22 people found this helpful

avoid older editions

ByMark VIon May 16, 2016

I originally gave this book 1 star because of the outrageous number of errors. I spent an hour going through the website's Errata trying to make all the corrections. However, even many of the corrections are murky, directing you to download updated code examples that don't exist. The author seems to have left this book for dead, even providing a dead email address on the website. The last straw was when my copy started falling apart...

Update: I was so disappointed with the quality of this book that I called the publisher (Wiley) to complain. They confirmed my issues and said that they were issuing free replacements of the book. In my case, having purchased from Amazon, they said I would have to go through the Seller, which I did. The seller ended up issuing me a full refund.

I re-purchased the latest printing of the book at Barnes & Noble and can report that all the errors have been corrected and the binding issue seems to have been resolved. So...

My warning to you is to avoid purchasing this book from Amazon, because you will not be able know if you have an older version with the above issues or a newer version without the issues.

That being said, I now give this book 4 stars. It is very thorough in explaining JavaScript in detail. My only two complaints are:

(1) the lack of any exercises to re-enforce the material; you read something then move on to the next subject. A lot of the material didn't "stick" without a way to re-enforce the concepts.

(2) I felt the book lacked real-world insights about JavaScript. For example, the newer .querySelector() is far superior and more flexible than .getElementById() or .getElementsByClassName(), but all were described matter-of-factly, without any descrimination. It was left up to you to figure out when or why, all things being equal, to use one over the other.

Finally, if you already have a good grasp of JavaScript, this book is a very good reference.

Top critical review

See all 72 critical reviews›

256 people found this helpful

Good and informative, but riddled with errors JavaScript novices might not notice.

ByKyle Hallemanon July 23, 2014

I love Jon Duckett's HTML and CSS book, it has been an invaluable resource in my career. I first started learning web development using it. I was eagerly awaiting this book for over a year. I couldn't wait to learn JavaScript any longer, so I picked up JavaScript: The Definitive Guide and learned a lot online thanks to Codecademy, CodeAvengers, and lots of other great online resources. So, I have a pretty good grasp of JavaScript and use it every day in my job. I still picked up this book when it was released because Duckett's previous book was so important to me and it never hurts to get different perspectives and reinforce my skills and knowledge.

I'm about halfway through this book so far and I love it, I'm learning some new things and understanding some concepts from a different angle than I previously did. So, it's already worth the price. However, this book could have used another pass through by a technical editor. It seems like they switched up how they wrote variables and functions halfway through and forgot to fix all the examples in the book. I'm just finishing the events chapter right now and the final example has grievous errors that prevent the page from working as intended. See below:

function writeLabel(e) {
if (!e) {
e = window.event;
}
target = event.target || event.srcElement;
textEntered = e.target.value;
noteName.textContent = textEntered;
}

Rather, it should be:

function writeLabel(e) {
if (!e) {
e = window.event;
}
target = e.target || e.srcElement;
textEntered = target.value;
noteName.textContent = textEntered;
}

Go to the accompanying website and try it for yourself: the "Audio Note" text doesn't update. I ignored the first few errors like this but when I got to this point in the book I just had to let others on Amazon know of the problems (my first Amazon review!). I like Duckett and want this book to succeed, but it needs another pass by a technical editor before complete novices can get full utility out of it.

Luckily, I have a good understanding of JavaScript so I can see where the errors are and correct them (maybe it's all a test!?). However, this book is intended for people who have never learned any JavaScript before and thus they will not realize the errors in the code. I'm sure the second printing or edition will fix some of these errors. If you're new to JavaScript, I want to recommend this but there are some gaping errors, so you should be careful and back up your learning with other resources.

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Five Stars

ByStephen Welchon May 29, 2017

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Excellent jquery reference - glossy pages and very detailed examples