Advanced is the right word
If you already know a lot about scripting it is probably a brilliant book but do not attempt to read it as a newbie.
I am not new to scripting but I found most of it too advanced - The parts I could follow had great solutions and suggestions though.
Best JavaScript/DOM/AJAX Book Ever
This is the greatest Modern JavaScript, DOM Scripting, and AJAX book I've ever seen. Having done AJAX since 1999 before the buzzword ever became popular, I can say that a book this exhaustive has never been written before now. It covers everything from the JavaScript's often misunderstood variable scope to the deep interaction with the DOM and everything in between.
This book is an intermediate to advanced book that requires that you have some understanding of our every day web technologies. If you are a web developer, then you are required to know XHTML and JavaScript anyway. This isn't just some surace level "how-to" book. This covers the deep internals of AJAX and will make you an expert.
Feel free to ignore anyone who claims this book contains spelling errors or other things that in no way change the overall structure of the book and that any thinking person can get around. No ant will ever make a sky scraper fall; it's irrelevant. This isn't an English book or a book for novices. It's a practically graduate-level JavaScript/DOM/AJAX book that requires you to be a thinking person to begin with.
riddled with bugs - wait for later version
UPDATE (3-17-08)
I bought this book again because the material is definitely good. I'm really bummed Friends Of Ed let it go to press with all these errors though. I mean, come on--I'm finding errors all over the place! That is a great disservice to Sambells. But I've decided the material is worth wading through the many, many copy editing oversights. I'm crossing my fingers I don't get stuck troubleshooting typos in the code that choke my browser. That could easily waste hours of my time.
-=-=-
I was pretty excited after I dropped the $50 or so to by this book because the contents are right down my alley. Unfortunately, I could hardly make it out of Chapter 1 for all the typos and editorial oversights. Here are a few as an example:
PG 34 -- "myVarialbe" instead of "myVariable"
PG 35 -- "when you retrieving" instead of "when you are retrieving"
PG 36 -- references a function called "initAchors()" that isn't used in the example code for that example. initAnchors() appears in the next example on the next page.
PG 37 -- number of iterations in loop changes from 3 to 5 from 1st example to 2nd example for no apparent reason - this is confusing and distracts from the point being made.
PG 37 -- Figure 1-7 shows three objects in diagram instead of the 5 needed (one for each loop)
This is all in just 3 pages!
This is the part of the book I started reading first so I assume the rest of the book is going to be as poorly edited/ proofread. This surprises me as I own over 5 or 6 titles from the Friend Of Ed series and I don't recall ever seeing so much as a typo in any of them.
Overall, I think the book shows promise. But I can't tolerate errors like this in a programming book. They are difficult enough to read already without having to figure out what the message was "supposed" to be.
I'm returning this book to the store. When it reaches a later edition I may give it another go. It needs some serious "debuggin" first though.
It is difficult to say...
The author clearly knows his stuff but I find the book hard to understand. Is it the author or my level of javascript experience? Hard to say. I will say this - you probably want to know javascript very well before getting this book. For those taking learning steps in javascript like myself, this book is far from the next step from Jeremy Keith's books.
Perfect in Every Way
This is truly a next generation book for building software on the web. There is nothing like it anywhere else. If you want to add the functionality, scalability, accessibility and the inevitable "bling of web 2.0", then you NEED to buy this book.
Jeff's writing style and tone in this book are perfect. He makes complicated topics simple and intuitive and presents real-world examples you can use today.
Only Caution: Don't buy this if you're a beginner (it's an AdvancED book for a reason). You'll want a good understanding of CSS, Javascript and HTML to get the most out of this book. All professional web software engineers will want this book close by 24/7.
(5 reviews)
