Professional JavaScriptTM for Web Developers (Wrox Professional Guides)

click here for more details, find new or used items	Nicholas C. Zakas Our price £17.49 (£24.99) New from £9.42 Used from £9.43 Pages: 672 (Paperback) ISBN: 0764579088 Pub: John Wiley & Sons Pub date: 2005-04-26 Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 49879

Reader Reviews:

Nice to dip into (0/0 people found this helpful)

If you have been doing javascript for a while and came across all these ajax libraries using odd techniques like "prototype". For the developer who swept OO javascript under the carpet a while ago (me), this book helps you pull the rug off and dust down all those ideas about "OO in a script langauge?" and get to grips with it fast as when you start doing more and more ajax or silverlight those techniques are key to creating javascript components instead of relying on "functional" style programming.

Its no beginners book and its no reference manual, I won't say I've read it cover to cover (I skipped sections explaining OO, I know what it is I just chose to limit it to c#).

Well worth a look.

Dated and not for real programmers. Handle examples with extreme caution. (3/4 people found this helpful)

I have enormous problems with this dated, confused and 'gappy' book, and advise would be readers to exercise _extreme_ caution with it, particularly with the examples, a great number of which are a long, long way from currently accepted best practice.

I don't believe that "Programmer to Programmer" describes this book well. The author's confusing and patchy descriptions of language fundamentals are not useful to those readers who are highly experienced in other programming languages such as C or C++. Neither does it seem that the author has clearly identified the target reader, as I imagine that the book will bewilder some beginners too. For example, for reasons unknown the author seemed to feel the need to embark on a "fundamentals of OOP" tutorial, a subject quite inappropriate for a "programmer-to-programmer" text as it should be taken as read, and one which is in any case too large to be adequately covered in a few pages. I imagine this may merely succeed in confusing novice programmers, who really do need to consult a proper introduction elsewhere. And why on earth did the author feel that a quick descent into UML was appropriate at the start of the third chapter? Another short section is devoted to explaining bit pattern operations, a subject that is arguably best left to real textbooks on programming fundamentals for beginners. At the same time, in many, many cases discussions of basic topics that experienced programmers would expect to find are simply absent. Javascript is in many ways highly unusual as a programming language, and because of the familiar syntax, C, C++ or Java programmers may be initially led to believe that its behaviour will be close to their expectations, yet this is not the case. For this reason it is crucial for a reference text to take care to tick off these crucial language-conversion issues properly.

Returning to the code examples, I have many problems with their poor quality. A sizeable number do not conform to current "unobtrusive" best practise. I can understand why this might have been done for reasons of brevity, but that doesn't excuse the poor example this sets. There is no discussion of accessibility, which is unforgiveable. And some of examples feature outdated, broken or deprecated techniques. The discussion of hacks to bolster up browser support for addEventListener, for example. Browser-sniffing, a deprecated technique features far too much, indeed a worrying number of examples rely on it. The author of this review is nowhere near competent to comment in detail on the quality of every code example, but the poor techniques clearly visible in some have the effect of casting doubt on the whole.

Despite being published in 2005, the book is simply too old to cover the recent tidal wave of high quality libraries which are now available, and which properly deal with some of the most difficult issues in basic javascript development, issues which this book simply does not acknowledge. The book deserves criticism for being yet one more contributor to the vast amount of poor quality javascript code on the web, yet of course it has to be said that any paper book will inevitable be vulnerable to the problem of obsolescence, since javascript support in browsers is so poor currently and techniques are changing rapidly right now.

This review is unapologetically harsh, yet I am not going to say "do not buy this book" outright. Although dated and harmful for beginners, there is a lot of material in this book, and for very experienced programmers in other programming languages who are forewarned about the book's unreliability it will at least give some idea of the issues and will provide a starting point for gathering a list of topics to be researched. But many readers may be simply better off consulting the blogs of the various acknowledged javascript gurus instead. Reading Brendan Eich's own articles would be a start.

Excellent book for the intermediate to advanced developer (1/1 people found this helpful)

I've been developing using JavaScript for 8 years now; during that time I've bought the O'Reilly JavaScript book, as well as their DHTML one and that was my bible, but they tend to get outdated very quickly and never really provided what I thought of to be very practical useful examples, hence they tend to gather dust!

This book on the other hand is fantastic and I'd say pretty up to date. It discusses everything from simple functions to extending element behaviour, and explains how to do it in syntax that works cross-browser - particularly handy for me as I develop sites that need to work in IE and Mozilla on both PC and MAC. The best thing is that it addresses real-life scenarios you'll need to code for, something that Microsoft and other software documentation generally lacks in abundance.

Ignore the "standards" put down by the other reviewer - we're not academics - we're developers!

Tip Top (5/5 people found this helpful)

Excellent book! This is still the best and most in depth Javascript book I have come across. A great companion if you want to take things just that little bit further is Sitepoints DHTML Utopia: Modern Web Design Using Javascript & DOM by Stuart Langridge.

Tip top don't pass this one over!!! WHY HAVEN'T YOU BOUGHT IT YET!!!

Essential information with a practical approach (6/6 people found this helpful)

Being a software developer with limited knowledge of JavaScript (I have mostly developed in Java), I was looking for a book on JavaScript, that could teach me the do's and don'ts of JavaScript.
This is the book!
Instead of being a complete reference guide (like most recent JavaScript books are), this book takes a broader approach to the subject, explaining _why_ JavaScript/ECMAscript works like it does, how to work with eg. Objects and interitance, and last but not least it explains how to make your JavaScript work consistently in most browsers, despite the obvious differences in implementation of JS.
I highly recommend this book, if you have some programming skills, possibly basic knowledge of JavaScript and want to explore the full potential of clientside JavaScript - in a "professional" context (no tips on text-scrolling and the like).

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