ppk on JavaScript [Paperback]

"ppk on JavaScript" fills an interesting void with the focus of today's JavaScript books. Most books either focus on "JavaScript in 21 Days", "JavaScript - Complete Reference" or "AJAX". This book covers techniques for creating clean and accessible JavaScript functionality.

The book's stated audience is someone who knows at least some JavaScript - a beginning level or up. Basically, you should feel comfortable reading and understanding code. I think the book might be a little overwhelming for a beginner to understand. A beginner could read it twice - once right away and once after reading another JavaScript book.

The author views JavaScript as a technique to add usability. He shows how to create "unobtrusive" JavaScript. In other words, the JavaScript stays out of the HTML page and the page works without JavaScript, albeit with less functionality.

Eight case studies (real life examples) are used throughout the book. The author points out why he selected certain techniques. He also notes bugs and where he would have done things differently. I particularly liked the emphasis on separation of concerns.

Keyboard users are also discussed from an accessibility point of view in several chapters. In other chapters, only users without JavaScript enabled were discussed. I would have liked a little more consistency with how accessibility was treated.

Overall, the book was very good. The tips were useful and I enjoyed the emphasis on design. And AJAX is discussed from the point of view of how it was used before it was called AJAX.

It's funny, from looking at the title of the book, "PPK on JavaScript", you would never know it is one of the most interesting and informative JavaScript books on the market. PPK - Peter-Paul Koch is a well-known JavaScript and web developer from the Netherlands. His website [...] has pretty much been the defacto standard resource for all browser and JavaScript issues for the past few years. If there was something you wanted to know about JavaScript or some browser bug or issue you would go to his website or email him. He probably is not known unless you read some of the well-known development blog sites. He does not do public speaking at web conferences (unlike Jeremy Keith), but maybe after this book he will. And yes, most people it seems just call him PPK, not Peter so I guess that is one of the reason of the book title.

Anyways, on to the book review...Since I have most of the latest JavaScript books that have been published the past year, I was hoping this would be a little different, which it was. The skill level for this book is probably leaning towards the intermediate side since many of the code-snippets that PPK talks about use DOM syntax. Though that is not to say that if you're a beginner you shouldn't buy this book, but you will need to fast-forward to the middle of the book (Chapter 5), which he gives a great background of the Core concepts of the JavaScript language.

So basically the book is split into 3 sections (or how I see them separated). The first 4 chapters goes into high-level topics that are great for the basic DOM scripting who knows the basics of using the DOM but needs more instruction with usability, accessibility, standards and how the different layers (structure, content and presentation) work. These 4 chapters are the best in my opinion because most of these topics would require you to search endless articles on the web to find them. Apart from a few pages in the 5th edition of JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, I have not seen this in any other book. Chapter 5: The Core; covers all basics of the language to get anybody up to speed or use as a reference. The rest of the book covers topics such as the BOM (Browser Object Model), Events, DOM (Document Object Model), and CSS modification. The included source examples are the real gem of the book since it is real JavaScript applications that were used in real clients, not just little code examples that cannot be used in the real environment.

So if you need another JavaScript book and not sure what to get, or you have bought Jeremy Keith's excellent book (DOM Scripting: Web Design with JavaScript) and want to learn more about the DOM and accessibility or you are a newbie and want to learn the latest JavaScript standards and practices from a real developer, then this is the book for you. Go out and get it now!

I bought this book because I was familiar with the author and his website, quirksmode. I figured this guy was a master of JavaScript and a book written from him would be a solid resource to learn from.

Well, I was half-right. Early on in the book he presents a script and says that you should know what it does before reading his book. Well, I knew what it was, but it's not the truth. This book is all about technique and execution. He shows innovative and great ways to implement code, but you have to know how to write javascript first. If you're not an experienced programmer or are unfamiliar with javascript, you may want to consider this book...after you've gotten a proven beginner's manual and gone through that first. Head First Javascript or Javascript in 21 days are good examples.

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