Professional JavaScript for Web Developers [Paperback]

The key to knowing about this book is the word "Professional" in the title. There are other books aimed at the complete beginner that will start off with a much simpler "Here's How" approach to get you started. This book instead starts off with the history, the basic ECMAScript standards and a discussion on the Object nature of JavaScript. It's written by a working programmer to fill the real world needs of other working programmers. It does this job very well.

Further, the book is new and up to date. JavaScript is an evolving language as the web grows to demand increasing capabilities. Some of these features that now get full chapters in this book include: XML, Client-Server communications, Web Services, interacting with Plug-Ins.

The last chapter talks about the next step in the development of JavaScript, with cautions that this material is still preliminary and subject to change.

Excellent book for the intermediate to advanced JavaScript programmer.

Many poor quality books on this topic had been published along the years, helping JavaScript into becoming the less understood programming languages of all time. It's nice to see how finally there is another JavaScript book worth reading apart from the classic titles by Goodman and Flanagan. The book is not aimed at beginners; you either have some solid JavaScript knowledge or a decent programming experience with other languages. Compared to other titles this stands out for the chapters covering modern techniques: DOM, Client-Server Communication, XML/XSLT, and Web Services. I would say it's the most current coverage of JavaScript to date. In my own opinion, only some poor editing and organisation prevent it from reaching five stars.

I have enormous problems with this dated, confused and 'gappy' book, and advise would be readers to exercise _extreme_ caution with it, particularly with the examples, a great number of which are a long, long way from currently accepted best practice.

I don't believe that "Programmer to Programmer" describes this book well. The author's confusing and patchy descriptions of language fundamentals are not useful to those readers who are highly experienced in other programming languages such as C or C++. Neither does it seem that the author has clearly identified the target reader, as I imagine that the book will bewilder some beginners too. For example, for reasons unknown the author seemed to feel the need to embark on a "fundamentals of OOP" tutorial, a subject quite inappropriate for a "programmer-to-programmer" text as it should be taken as read, and one which is in any case too large to be adequately covered in a few pages. I imagine this may merely succeed in confusing novice programmers, who really do need to consult a proper introduction elsewhere. And why on earth did the author feel that a quick descent into UML was appropriate at the start of the third chapter? Another short section is devoted to explaining bit pattern operations, a subject that is arguably best left to real textbooks on programming fundamentals for beginners. At the same time, in many, many cases discussions of basic topics that experienced programmers would expect to find are simply absent. Javascript is in many ways highly unusual as a programming language, and because of the familiar syntax, C, C++ or Java programmers may be initially led to believe that its behaviour will be close to their expectations, yet this is not the case. For this reason it is crucial for a reference text to take care to tick off these crucial language-conversion issues properly.

Returning to the code examples, I have many problems with their poor quality. A sizeable number do not conform to current "unobtrusive" best practise. I can understand why this might have been done for reasons of brevity, but that doesn't excuse the poor example this sets. There is no discussion of accessibility, which is unforgiveable. And some of examples feature outdated, broken or deprecated techniques. The discussion of hacks to bolster up browser support for addEventListener, for example. Browser-sniffing, a deprecated technique features far too much, indeed a worrying number of examples rely on it. The author of this review is nowhere near competent to comment in detail on the quality of every code example, but the poor techniques clearly visible in some have the effect of casting doubt on the whole.

Despite being published in 2005, the book is simply too old to cover the recent tidal wave of high quality libraries which are now available, and which properly deal with some of the most difficult issues in basic javascript development, issues which this book simply does not acknowledge. The book deserves criticism for being yet one more contributor to the vast amount of poor quality javascript code on the web, yet of course it has to be said that any paper book will inevitable be vulnerable to the problem of obsolescence, since javascript support in browsers is so poor currently and techniques are changing rapidly right now.

This review is unapologetically harsh, yet I am not going to say "do not buy this book" outright. Although dated and harmful for beginners, there is a lot of material in this book, and for very experienced programmers in other programming languages who are forewarned about the book's unreliability it will at least give some idea of the issues and will provide a starting point for gathering a list of topics to be researched. But many readers may be simply better off consulting the blogs of the various acknowledged javascript gurus instead. Reading Brendan Eich's own articles would be a start.

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