20 of 20 people found the following review helpful
2.0 out of 5 stars
Not a good buy, Jan 6 2011
By L. Xue - Published on Amazon.com
Ce commentaire est de: JavaScript Bible (Paperback)
If you have to buy one book on javascript, don't buy this one, buy "Javascript: The Definitive Guide" instead. If you have to buy two books, three books, four books...then buy this one(but not before "Pro Javascript Techniques" and "Javascript: The Good Parts".
Those books will teach you the correct way to design and implement javascript programs, something that I am not sure Javascript Bible quite accomplishes. To be sure, Javascript Bible contains the most factual content out of any of the books I just mentioned, but you can get that factual content by searching "mozilla javascript <whatever it is you don't understand/DOM/Canvas/Events>" in Google. For all the facts in Javascript Bible, there's very little opinion about what constitutes a good program. I believe this is a crucial gap: just as there is good English style, there is good Javascript style, and a good introduction to the Javascript language ought to include good style guidelines.
In addition to the lack of style guidelines, much of the book is poorly organized(although, the section on DOM is excellent). XMLHttprequest(the technology behind Ajax) is relegated to a ebook on the attached CDRom, while many pages are wasted discussing antiquated browser compatibility issues(IE 5, really?).It's clear that the authors have been too lazy to keep each revision up to date with the most relevant information, and instead just kept on piling crap on top of crap by overflowing large portions of the book onto a CDRom(If you look at the contents, roughly 600 pages of the book are on CDRom). I bought a book so I could have information on paper!
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
2.0 out of 5 stars
"Black boxed" fatally flawed, avoid this book, Jan 5 2012
By Ed Z - Published on Amazon.com
Ce commentaire est de: JavaScript Bible (Paperback)
Me have 200 computer books, paperback, and e. Make my living on computers.
Got the JavaScript Bible, in addition to a few others, as need to use javascript for database web applications and most of my reference material for this is over 4 years old. Even have the JavaScript Bilbe 6th edition. While the book is detailed on the topics, and the explinations are good, the code is useless for all practical purposes.
There are two reasons for this:
1.The authors think it is more important that you code to professional standards ( a good goal) so they have a link to all scripts. That is instead of using a block of code in the sample, they have an html page and then a js page. Now in production they are 100% right. For learning javascript, they couldn't be further out in left field. It just complicates everything for a beginner.
2. Even worse, is that nearly all/most of the javascript code, at least up to page 217, which is as far as I have read at the moment, requires their javascript library, which is not even printed but referred to as being on the cd, nor even briefly described as far as functions it contains, etc. You are just supposed to load it into your root directory, that is if you know enough to do that, and blindly follow their code as they give you the function calls and the parameters to use, again with no explanation. Er, uh, that is in their own words from pg 138
" NOTE:
The property assignment even-handling technique employed throughout the code in this chapter, and much of the book, is addEvent(), a cross browser event handler explained in detail in chapter 32 [ chapter 32 starts on page 1043 ], "Event Objects".
The addEvent () function is part of the script file jsb-global.js, located on the accompanying CD-ROM in the content folder where it is accessible to all chapter scripts."
Which I have "WEAK" penned in with an arrow to, in the margin of the book. This is ridiculous. It is like taking a painting course, like for portraits, and the instructor tells you that you need to use their "robo arm" that paints for you. WHAT?? So how is one supposed to take the concepts and use them in their own code if the code for these concepts doesn't work without the jsb-global.js file? Further, if you need to learn to use a library, why not start with the king of javascript libraries, jQuery?
This book is tragic. The explanations are top notch. The detail is a thing of beauty. It is minutely accurate from what I've read so far, a veritable work of art. And the code is useless with practical application near zero.
To the good is that by having multiple books on Javascript, the theory in the JavaScript Bible 7th ed is useful, because practical examples and code that one can play with for hands on experience, as in "Built it from scratch by myself" is available elsewhere.
Forced to give it only two stars as it is of less than average good to a beginner and requires hundreds of pages of reading, chapter 32 for instance, to understand what you are doing on page 138 and from what I can tell by skimming and taking their word for it, most of the rest of the book.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Superb reference, excellent companion to "Beginning JavaScript", Jun 27 2011
By E. Moore "Just another pixel pusher!" - Published on Amazon.com
Ce commentaire est de: JavaScript Bible (Paperback)
I picked up this book while I was working my way through Beginning JavaScript precisely because I wanted an encyclopedic reference at my fingertips. It's not a textbook or a learn-by-building-a-project guide. But if you have to develop on a corporate intranet with 2700 IE 6 users, this book can be a lifesaver - it tells you what will work where, as well as syntactical differences when writing for different BOMs & DOMs.