Beginning JavaScript [Paperback]

Let me start by noting that, at its heart, this is a solidly written book for beginners. A neophyte with a modicum of aptitude could pick up this book and learn to program Javascript. It'd be a five-star-er--I'm sure it was a five-star book when the first edition came out.

Let me say that I'm an old hand at JS, and an even older hand at writing books and programming. JS is one of those languages (like most of them) where I sat down and started programming out of necessity. And when I do that, I like to go back to square one when I have a chance and see if I've overlooked any basics. This is the book I chose to use for that, based largely on the reviews of the top JS books on Amazon.

And, the thing is, I really like this book. I can see that the original author, Wilton, put a lot of care into it. He wrote his code clearly, and described it in easy-to-follow chunks. He takes small steps and gives just enough repetition. It's not a lightning introduction: It walks you through it.

Now, what happens with coding books is that the book gets written, and if it sells well, the publisher wants it updated for the next version. So the author (or someone new) comes in and goes to see what's valid and what's not, adds a few notes, a few caveats, and maybe a couple of chapters at the end. The publisher wrings a few more sales out of this and it's probably sufficient. At least for a second edition, if things haven't changed too much.

This, however, is the fourth edition of a book that was originally written in 2000! For WEB technology! Wilton focuses smartly on the nuts-and-bolts of JS, so that stuff holds up, but if your mission is to get stuff done on a modern website with JS, this book is going to feel really stale.

Some examples:

The book starts off by having you write stuff to the status bar. What's that? You don't know what a status bar is? That's because they haven't been used in browsers much for years.

Browsers: There's a lot of emphasis on IE6 compatibility issues even though IE6 is down to about 2% of the market. Chrome (with about 20%+ market share) is included as an after-thought, and sometimes not at all. Forget about Safari or mobile devices.

There's a discussion on frames that's completely innocent of the debate over whether they should be used at all.

There's a chapter on DHTML. It's fine, but "DHTML" isn't the preferred nomenclature, to quote Walter Sobchak. Generally, the constituent parts of HTML, Javascript and CSS are used because, well, they're different things (and require different approaches).

All of chapter 13 is devoted to ActiveX, reflecting a year 2000 sensibility, when you could just program for IE.

The Ajax chapter was added in the third edition by McPeak, who presumably also updated this edition, and it starts with a link to Google Suggest which is no longer valid (because Google Suggest was incorporated into regular Google the year before the fourth edition was released.)

McPeak also presumably added the chapter on Javascript libraries which jumps between Jquery, Prototype and MooTools. It's not bad, but it's not much, either.

I don't really fault McPeak here. It's a tough thing to do, to go through and revise this stuff and keep it technically accurate. Keeping it fresh is nigh impossible. I think the smart thing to do, really, would be to teach Javascript hand-in-hand with a particular framework. That approach would present its own problems, of course, but it would eliminate pages and pages of browser-specific stuff.

In any event, it wouldn't be this book. For Javascript fundamentals, this is still solid. Just don't look to getting more than your beak wet when it comes to use in real life.

I still give it three stars, which is high praise for an eleven year old tech book.

The Kindle version gets only two stars, however: Wrox didn't format any of the code, so it's all left-indented. That was hard for ME to read, and it'd be torture for a JS initiate.

This book is an excellent resource for a beginning student of JavaScript. The many examples and exercises put the beginner through her or his paces and slowly but surely cement in new ideas that add to the requisite bag of tricks.

My one criticism of this book is that it sometimes does not pay attention to the interaction between standards-compliant HTML and/or XHTML and as a result might give an inexperienced beginner somewhat outdated information. For example, in several places, the now-deprecated <script language="javascript"> syntax is used. Several examples also leave out the entire <head> element, which would violate the standards of even XHTML 1.0 Transitional.

Overall, however, I can highly recommend this book.

This book was wonderful in helping me better understand JavaScript and getting back on my feet after reading so many bad "Beginner" books. I can't wait to re-learn jQuery as well.

The layout of the book is as follows:

Introduction.

Chapter 1: Introduction to JavaScript and the Web.

Chapter 2: Data Types and Variables.

Chapter 3: Decisions, Loops, and Functions.

Chapter 4: Common Mistakes, Debugging, and Error Handling.

Chapter 5: JavaScript -- An Object-Based Language.

Chapter 6: Programming the Browser.

Chapter 7: HTML Forms: Interacting with the User.

Chapter 8: Windows and Frames.

Chapter 9: String Manipulation.

Chapter 10: Date, Time, and Timers.

Chapter 11: Storing Information: Cookies.

Chapter 12: Dynamic HTML and the W3C Document Object Model.

Chapter 13: Using ActiveX and Plug-Ins with JavaScript.

Chapter 14: Ajax.

Chapter 15: JavaScript Frameworks.

Appendix A: Answers to Exercises.

Appendix B: JavaScript Core Reference.

Appendix C: W3C DOM Reference.

Appendix D: Latin-1 Character Set.

As you can see, the book followed what I thought to be a more natural progression when learning JavaScript and it didn't jump around to several different topics at once like most other books do. This book also had a WHOLE chapter dedicated to Windows and Frames, which was something else I had been looking for in a book.

Great read, highly recommended, pick it up ASAP!

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