Comprehensive
This is one big book, considering it's a fairly basic language. But it's full of helpful examples and has a well organized Table of Contents. It is also useful as it describes cross browser issues. It's very comprehensive. It's the only Javascript book I bother reading if I don't just search the Internet for the answers to my javascript questions.
Best Book On Javascript 1.5 to date
The book covers Javascript 1.5. This may be the best, most complete book on the market. The messy side of using Javascript is that documentation for it is not complete, anywhere, including Netscape's website. Particularly when you want to see an example detailing how to do something. This book is not complete, in that it doesn't detail every element and function that you can do with Javascript. But when comparing it with the current books on the market, including Danny Goodman's Javascript Bible series, this book is better, deeper, more complete. However, if you have never written any Javascript, this is not the book for you, yet. Get a Goodman book, then this one.
The Needed Spellbook
If JavaScript were magic, and you were an intermediate mage, this would be the book to go with. Methods, properties, attributes, etc., are neatly detailed in spellbook fashion -- including individual compatibility charts for today's major browsers. "Inside JavaScript" takes a comprehensive look at everything JavaScript without having the reader wade through tedious background drivel. Moreover, the text covers the DOM and CSS quite well - providing adequately documented code samples where necessary. The relative freshness of this book allows for a more complete approach to such developing technologies as XML and Microsoft's external behaviors. Other JavaScript books can't compete for the simple fact that they were, for the most part, penned well before a good deal of the major new technologies out there became a large portion of the developer's toolbox.
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