Rating:  - Excellent text for JavaScript courses
I've seen many a book that failed abysmally to teach what it claimed to teach. For this reason, it's a treat to find a book like Paul Wilton's Beginning JavaScript, a book that lives up to its hype.
I am an instructor who teaches Web Development, and I use Wilton's book as a text for my beginner and intermediate JavaScript courses. The thoroughness of Wilton's treatment of the fundamental concepts cannot be beat. Yes, he is sparse in his discussion of ASP, but why anyone would expect him to do otherwise is baffling. This is not a book on ASP, but JavaScript. It also is a BEGINNING book on JavaScript, so one should not expect discussions that go beyond that level.
For anyone considering learning JavaScript on their own, or for any instructor wanting to provide a good reference source for their JavaScript students, I highly recommend Paul Wilton's Beginning JavaScript.
Rating: - Serves as a How To and a Reference
This is a great book that not only taught me JavaScript, but also serves as one of my main references today. A word of caution though, don't pick this book up FIRST as an intro to developing Web based client/server applications. This book will show you how to do EVERYTHING (both client and server side processing) in JavaScript. Depending on the technology you're using, this probably won't be the way should go about doing your sever side processing. I was starting to use ASP when I picked this book. I knew that JavaScript was used in ASP so I picked up the Sams Teach Yourself ASP in 21 days along with this book. Well to make a long story short, I read very little of the Sams book, and got into this one very quickly. I definitely learned JavaScript, but made things much more difficult for myself for about a month or so. That said, this is a great book.
Rating:  - Not really for the beginner
If you really are "beginning JavaScript", then I wouldn't recommend this book. It's a large, dense volume that goes into great detail. But trying to find, for example, how to do rollovers (image swaps) in the index is an exercise in frustration. Nothing under "rollovers", nothing under "image swaps", the references for "onMouseOver" lead to examples that are too complicated. ...
Rating:  - Not bad
Well another Wrox addition....
I got more than enough from this book to give me a good intro to JavaScript. There are a lot of exercises and tutorial work to do that is consistent with the concepts, probably what appeals to me most about Wrox books.
The first few intro chapters are REALLY dry and basic.. a veteran programmer can easily skip them over or cruise pretty quickly through them at least. But the more middle chapters are nice and meaty. The books discusion of Netscape vs IE is a bit outdated considering.. Most of that I just ignored. And I would steer clear of ever wanting to use expressions. It is a beginner book and rightfuly so. Many of the later chapters I just ignored and found I had it covered in other publications. Guess I'll be buy Pro books from now on from Wrox unless it's some language I've never used (like C#)..
But it's a good and I can say that I have found plenty of useful tips, and concepts and new ideas. And anything that helps me in my job is more than welcome. Definatly recommended
Rating: - Superb introduction to JavaScript for programmers
The black stripe at the top of this book says "Programmer to Programmer." This is not a book of tricks, like many JavaScript titles out there. This is a book for serious programmers and it is geared to the web programmer, since JavaScript is most often used on the web client side. The book does go a bit fast in some areas, but careful reading and reviewing will help a lot and anyone who is serious about programming shouldn't have a problem. Of course, when learning any language a background in programming does help, but this book is a good starting point for anyone who is serious about actually learning how to program. If all you want is a book of tricks, this book is not for you. I would purchase the Visual Quickstart Guide to JavaScript instead, or look for a free web tutorial. There are many JavaScript sites that give tricks away for free. However, if you need to know how to build JavaScript from the ground up, I don't think you can do much better than this book.
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