Win Your Copy: JavaScript for Programmers
ISBN: 0137001312
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| JavaScript for Programmers is a very good book for those who are new to web development and want to understand the basics of client-side scripting with JavaScript. There are plenty of examples illustrating the concepts in the book. |
Review
The first chapter is a high-level introduction to JavaScript, and the history of web development. Chapters two and three provide a good introduction to XHTML and CSS development. This material will be important to anyone with no web development experience.
Chapter four introduces readers to the concept of client-side scripting and some basic JavaScript syntax, while the next two chapters take an in-depth look at using control statements like 'if', 'while' and 'switch'. Chapters 7, 8 and 9 explore the use of functions, arrays and objects in JavaScript. The material on arrays and objects is where the book starts to become more useful to web developers with some experience. The last section of chapter nine takes a quick look at JSON (JavaScript Object Notation).
Chapter 10 reviews objects and collections available in the Document Object Model (DOM). The authors do a nice job illustrating how to retrieve data from and manipulate data in the DOM. Chapter 11 explains how events are handled in JavaScript.
Chapter 12 is an interesting chapter about XML and RSS. It begins with the basics of XML and moves into some information about performing transformations on data with XSL. The final chapter gives readers an introduction to Ajax, Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) and the Dojo Toolkit.
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Comments
bhargett replied on Wed, 2009/05/06 - 7:43am
Vivek replied on Wed, 2009/05/06 - 9:36am
I have been developing in JavaScript for 4 years. Initially I didnt like it.. browser incompatablilites...lack of tool support.. langauge limitations..testing was difficult...but now I just love it. I use IntelliJ and its got the best JavaScript support. JavaScript is really powerful languge..you could change the behaviour of an object runtime, adding new methods dynamically.. At our company our framework is built on top of Dojo.. we use most of the Dojo widgets and for some we even extended the widgets and we build a framework on top of Selenium called Tellurium which eases the pain of writing JavaScript tests..
Yancey Vickers replied on Wed, 2009/05/06 - 12:19pm
rafferty replied on Wed, 2009/05/06 - 7:37pm
envp replied on Thu, 2009/05/07 - 8:05am
toddekey replied on Thu, 2009/05/07 - 8:40am
Stefano Girotti replied on Thu, 2009/05/07 - 9:20am
dsacks replied on Thu, 2009/05/07 - 12:14pm
I'm starting to work with jQuery to replace tedious and overly complex DOM manipulation code.
I'm also interested in using JSON.
srpsco replied on Thu, 2009/05/07 - 3:34pm
I have been writing JavaScript since the late 90's when we still called it DHTML. What I love about jquery and similar modern frameworks is that they abstract the browser differences - this goes a long way to being able to write a single version iof the code that will work on most if not all browsers. Jquery, also makes it easier for those with a web development (HTML and CSS) background to begin writing solid javascript, since it leverages the CSS selector syntax.
We are considering adding jquery to our universities ERP product to overide the standard form submission, to allow us to create a business rule checking layer between the exisiting forms and the database. This would use a series of if statements, allowing our end users and programmers to speak the same language to develop the rules for the syste, and guarantee better data quality.
Doing it as a a middle tier with jQuery means that we can update the product from the vendor without having to recreate all of the custom changes.
Would love to read and pass this book along to our ERP programmers who have not done much with javascript (they are mostly Java, pl/sql and C programmer).
drogus replied on Thu, 2009/05/07 - 7:00pm
I used javascript for the first time about 10 years ago. I was designing first websites (frames, gifs flying all around, marquee :) and wanted to add some "cool stuff" ;-) After learning basics of DOM I've wrote arkanoid in javascript (I remember that it was quite slow on my 200mhz machine) and many other DOM scripts. It was fun, but if jQuery had been there I wouldn't have to waste my time fightinh with browser and enjoy it much more.
Nowadays I can't imagine writing javascript without jQuery. I use jQuery a lot in my Rails and Merb projects in an unobtrusive way, often just passing and receiving JSON messages. Simplicity of jQuery and really big plugin base saves me a lot of time. :)
Christian Voller replied on Fri, 2009/05/08 - 2:39am
nabuchodonozor replied on Fri, 2009/05/08 - 2:44am
JavaScript and jQuery in particular plays large part in my websites today. I try not to use it for essential functionality but eyecandy relies hevily on it. Also any kind of ajax means using jQuery.