Rating:  - Good for beginners
I chose this book as my introduction to JavaScript and am quite pleased with it. It pretty well covers all the basics and is worth a straight-through read. The author builds several examples, expanding on them as the book progresses. Each time a large block of code is presented. If you can't figure out what is going on just by inspecting the code, each section is followed by a detailed 'how it works' explanation.
The book was thorough enough to give me a good understanding of just about everything I needed to know to begin developing a rather complex client-side application. I had to go to a more in-depth reference to learn how to assign an event handler with parameters to a control that was being generated by code, but that was about all that I did not find covered in this book.
I would definitely recommend this book to Javascript beginners, particularly those who are willing to read steadily through it.
Rating: - Beware: Not the Second Edition!
I already have a copy of the year 2000 edition of this book and it was a great book. I found this 2003 book and I ordered one because I thought it was the second edition. But I WAS WRONG. It is exactly the same as the 2000 edition, covering only NN up to ver 4 and IE up to 5. I had to return it at my own expense.
If you already have a first edition, DON'T BUY this book. You would end up with two copies of the same book. If you don't have a first edition, I would still recommend JavaScript Bible by Danny Goodman or O'Reilly's JavaScript than this book. They are more up-to-date.
Rating: - old code but covered very well by this book
I have been using javascript on and off and for a while I
hav stayed away from it due to poor material and bad
presentation on some very bad books.
This book is exception for all those who have lost confidence
and compliments well with my later .net collection of books.
well done.
Rating:  - Very thorough, but needs to get to the point
I bought this book as an amateur web site author trying to learn some new tricks for my site, and hoping to ease my way into some more serious web authoring. The good news is that this book is incredibly thorough and detailed. The bad news is that he takes you through it all at his pace, instead of helping you get what you want out of it. Put another way, I found this book very user-unfriendly.
First of all, I wanted to learn a couple really basic things for my site -- like how to make a pop-up window -- and then move onto more advanced things. But instead of a TOC that reads something like, "How to make a pop-up window" he uses all JavaScript lingo that means nothing to a beginner. The index is the same way, and so I'm forced to go through this book at HIS pace -- trying to learn a whole bunch of stuff I have no interest in --instead of my own, and still don't know how to do the few things I wanted to learn first.
On the good side, this book is extraordinarily thorough and detailed, and he does an excellent job of explaining how the scripts work. However, overall I feel that it will be far more useful as a reference than as a learning book, and now I may have to shell out another $40 for a book because I'm not sure I can suffer through another chapter of this one.
Rating:  - Best if kept on your Desk at all times
You won't be ashamed to have this "Beginning" book on display on your desk. It's easy to use and very descriptive. Plenty of examples and they work! After buying this book I thought I would upgrade after a few weeks but I was wrong... I still use this manual.
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