- Good coverage of most common and many obscure aspects of the javascript language.
- Logical presentation order for intermediate level readers with those parts best skipped over initial
- Reasonable coverage of object oriented programming using Javascripts prototyping capabilities.
- Many examples of incorrect code eg. use of document.write with XHTML which will not work.
- Almost no mention of regular expressions, a far more useful part of javascript than many of the more
- Use of deprecated code such as escape()
- Some information completely incorrect with regard to Internet Explorer 7 eg. minimum window sizes
- Examples using outdated proprietary coding such as document.all
- First Edition: October 2006
- 335 page paperback
- Published by O'Reilly Media
- ISBN: 0-596-52746-2
- Add Life to Your Web Pages
- Author: Shelley Powers
Most books written for Javascript beginners concentrate on just showing you how to use Javascript to produce a few commonly used effects and functions and don't properly cover the rest of the language the way this one does. Books which do cover Javascript as a proper programming language tend to assume that the person using the book already has some background in programming. This book falls somewhere in between which makes it the ideal choice for someone just starting out with Javascript who wants to learn Javascript as a proper programming language.
The only flaws in the book are relatively minor but appear constantly through the code examples such as the use of an XHTML doctype with Javascript code that uses document.write or document.writeln both of which will not work with web pages that are actually delivered to the browser as XHTML. This could have been simply fixed just by specifying an HTML doctype for the examples rather than an XHTML one.
This would have been an excellent book for people to use to learn Javascript about three or four years ago. It still is a good book provided that you make allowance for the changes that have taken place in Javascript in the last few years which are not adequately covered in the book.
