JavaScript for the World Wide Web: Student Edition (Visual QuickStart Guides)

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Tom Negrino

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Pages: 592 (Paperback)

ISBN: 0321150716

Pub: Peachpit Press

Pub date: 2004-01-15

Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 72128

Editorial Review:

When Peachpit Press released the debut edition of JavaScript for the World Wide Web: Visual QuickStart Guide, it immediately became one of the most useful tools for busy Web developers. Now in its fourth edition, this book has been improved, expanded, and more finely tuned. Written for Web coders who have at least some familiarity with HTML, the book doesn't necessarily require you to have knowledge of JavaScript programming or scripting. The presentation is illustrative and productive, and concepts are introduced via practical examples, explained briefly, presented in code, and then explained line by line. Using judicious screen shots and new code highlighted in red, the authors have made JavaScriptquite intuitive. In this new edition, they point out features compatible with only certain Web browsers using new IE and Netscape icons. Along with its core content, the text includes an excellent genealogy of the various flavours of JavaScript, complete with an extensive object flowchart that is colour coded by browser version. It also steps outside the base language with a chapter on visual development tools that use JavaScript, such as Dreamweaver, GoLive, and Fireworks. There are tons of useful scripts in the book, and the publisher provides a companion Web where you can get each script, as well as an interface for viewing the code in action. You can download all of the scripts in a single ZIP file. This is simply a must-have guide to JavaScript. --Stephen W Plain

Topics covered:Browser detection, Rollovers, Cycling banners, Frames, Windows, Form validations, Regular expressions, Date and time display, Event handling, Cookies, Cascading style sheets (CSS), DHTML, User interface design, Bookmarklets, Visual development tools, Debugging, Genealogy and reference.

Reader Reviews:

Okay but leaves you wanting to know more (3/3 people found this helpful)

This is an okay book. Knowing nothing of Javascript I have been able to learn enough to write my own drop-down menus and image gallery pages etc. But frustratingly for an experienced programmer it doesn't cover some of the basics you would expect to learn of any language, such as types of variables and their declaration and scope. There is a chapter on frames which I didn't think anyone uses any more, but the chapter on cookies is next to useless - I couldn't make head nor tail of it and I've been programming for 20 years! The book wasn't a waste of money by any means, but don't expect to learn all you need to know about Javascript from it.

Excellent - lives up to the title (11/11 people found this helpful)

First things first: this is a book designed to get you up an running with JavaScript as quickly as possible. It does that very well covering up to an intermediate level in the use of the language. It is NOT a detailed under-the-hood guide to the internal workings of the language or a comparative study of using JavaScript on client and server sides. If you're the sort of person that thinks O'Reilly books are fun to read then leave right now because this isn't nearly good enough for you. But if you're a developer (or even a hobbyist) who needs to know JavaScript quickly without it becoming a core skill then I can't recommend this book enough.

Although I must say to all the 'true geeks' out there, if like me you learned the art of structured programming then you should be able to apply those skills to any language. This book will give you the information you need to understand how client side scripting with JavaScript differs from rich client application development.

This book is well written, fun to read, informative, and easy to understand. It contains lots of useful snippets of trivia and covers a lot of information in a short space without confusing the reader. Well worth the money.

Javascript for the World Wide Web Review: (1/1 people found this helpful)

An excelent book for beginers or experts covering a wide variety of javascript with clear and precise explanations. The best javascript book i have found so far and great value for money. Best when bought with HTML 5 Visual Quick Start Guide.

Much improved but could do better (7/7 people found this helpful)

Don't get me wrong I learnt my javascript with one of the earlier editions so it's an old friend. The fifth edition is what the fourth should have been. That one was way out of date. In ths one there are 3 new chapters, 2 near the beginning and one on nodes near the end. The mark-up code has been converted to XHTML but they missed the oportuunity of using a strict DTD so the are still some use of deprecated attributes notably bgcolor and align which could have easily been done in CSS. Also there is no character encoding so it will not validate with W3C. There is a good covering of topics and many variations of techniques but concentrating on form validation, menus and rollovers would have been better. There is still a lot of old stuff about older browsers which is no longer relevant and they should have stuck with the W3C DOM. All in all a much needed upgrade but this should have been done 3 years ago in the 4th edition and this one could have then tidied up the anomolies and looked to the future.

cut and paste, but little background knowledge (1/1 people found this helpful)

The scripts in this book did work when I tried them (once I typed them correctly!). The authors give you sort of enough information to customise the scripts for your own use, but you usually have to think pretty hard. However, if you want to take the commands used and totally rearrange them to make your own entirely new scripts, I'm afraid this book doesn't give you nearly enough knowledge. (Assuming you don't already know Javascript, which you probably don't if you're considering this book!)

In short, if you want to do some cool stuff quickly, and begin to think about making it up for yourself, this book does that very well. It is fun and easy to read. But if like me, you like to have the whole information available (even if you don't read it from cover to cover), this book isn't for you.

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