Rating:  - The Future is here.
The future is Javascript. Being a Microsoft technologies fanatic, I always wanted to make use of the AJAX library. My javascript needed some brusing and this was the book I went after. The complete reference, and a good companion to HTML/XHTML Complete Reference. David Flaganan's book is good too. Both deserve 5 stars.
Rating:  - A decent book
This is a fairly comprehensive book. This is not the best "beginner" book. The "beginner" info is in there - but it's mixed with so much advanced stuff that it can seem overwhelming. If you have previous experience, there's a lot of good stuff here. This is an excellent "second book."
Rating: - thorough coverage of the language
The text is a very good and complete explanation of JavaScript. It describes the best usage of JavaScript with the latest common browsers at the time of writing (early 2004). There are numerous examples which express the programming ideas in a simple fashion.
If you have programmed in other languages, JavaScript should be an easy learn with this book. Programs written in it tend not to be very long, as they are associated with a single web page. While JavaScript deals nicely with the various objects in a browser, like a window or document, the programs tend to have a procedural flavour.
Rating: - Not a a very good language guide
The book is pleasantly written and easy to read, but unfortunately there are some important ommissions as far as describing the JavaScript language itself.
Inheritence is barely mentioned. There is no explanation at all of how to invoke the parent constructor with parameters.
Exceptions are not explained at all in the first part of the book, which is the language guide. Instead they are mentioned at the very end - in the applied programming examples.
There is no good explanation of the internal logic of the language - why certain things are as they are and how they fit together.
Considering the recent trend of writing full blown JavaScript applications, there is a lot to be desired.
The book is much better as a guide to applying simple JavaScript. It covers a wide variety of topics in sufficient detail - DHTML, XMLHTTPRequest, etc. The example scripts do not seem to be production quality, but they serve the purpose of illustrating the ideas well enough.
Rating: - Outstanding reference and tutorial
As a CIS student with some prior programming experience, I find this 948 page tome both thorough and clearly written. The double table of contents, one brief, and the other very detailed, makes it easy to find what you need. Much attention is paid to cross-browser issues. You could concievably teach yourself JavaScript with this book alone.
|
