JavaScript : The Missing Manual

This is one missing manual that should have stayed missing. Failing that the author should have rewritten those sections that were obviously written before the manual went missing so that it described modern rather than 20th Century techniques in the simple examples.

Is this a book aimed at advanced JavaScript developers or is it aimed at newbies living back in the twentieth century? The book jumps backwards and forwards between antiquated coding techniques such as window.write() while covering basic techniques and then suddenly switches to covering advanced topics such as Regular Expressions and JQuery to confuse both beginners and more advanced programmers.

Many of the examples that the book uses are meaningless or confusing to an international audience - most people will not even know what a social security number is let alone how it should be formatted. The array example is extremely misleading in starting the array with Monday where the day of the week functionality built into JavaScript starts from Sunday.

The book does cover some aspects of JavaScript in an extremely thorough way but not in any sort of logical order. The sections covering JQuery are particularly interesting or at least would be if they weren't mixed in with all the other JavaScript code and introduced way too early in the book for beginners to have a proper grounding in the basics first. In some ways the book gives the impression that the author doesn't properly understand JavaScript that isn't making significant use of JQuery to provide much of the functionality and has therefore used the antiquated coding from 10 years ago to demonstrate many of the topics where he doesn't want to use JQuery in the example.