Please don't make your students use this text.
Nothing's more frustrating than being forced to plunk down close to $100 for a text book this poorly written and edited. The only reason this book is ever assigned is because because it has "plug and play" functionality with a couple of the big online classroom technologies (like the incredibly flawed Blackboard) utilized by several institutions of higher learning. The book is poorly organized and the amount of typos really does make the student less able to learn the material.
Basically, assigning this text to your students is admitting that you do not give a #$%*! about whether they learn the material.
Worst Technical Book ...Ever!!
This is the absolute worst technical book I have ever worked with for any class, and I have had many over my career. The technical information in this book is poorly communicated and is supported by weak examples. Then going into the project and case files at the end of the chapter becomes a frustrating task of determining if you're following the one of the multiple mistakes in the book, or finding out if you actually have mistakes of your own.
I am currently petitioning the school to change the book that they are using for their JavaScript class. If you are required to use this book for a class, Amazon has a great price. If you are considering this book for self study, I would strongly recommend considering something different.
Many mistakes and few helpful examples
I second what nkwebmama said, and then some. Not only are there many mistakes in the code (some of which are in the corrections on their site but many of which are not), but the approach used in the book makes those mistakes more of a problem than usual in this kind of a book.
The book fails in four regards: errors, content, pacing, and unhelpful examples.
Each chapter in this book asks the learner to copy the code in the book, as written, into an html document, and that is how it 'teaches' JavaScript. This isn't the best approach, but when it's compounded by incorrect code, it makes it extremely difficult for the student. There is only minimal explanation, you are just supposed to copy the code and go with it. It's a lot of typing for not much reward. This isn't my first programming language, but I am struggling to get much out of this book, and the others in my class are really lost.
The book tries to teach programming and the language together, which is a standard approach, but goes terribly wrong here. The pacing in this book is far too fast for someone who doesn't know programming, and the content is too heavy on basic programming and way too light on how to actually use JavaScript for someone who does.
It's also not enough to show how something works if the book don't also show how and when to use it, and that is where this book really falls down. For newbies, it barely touches on how to construct a program, which leaves them lost, and that's not the only basic concept the book leaves out. Just copying code from a book into a document doesn't really teach you how to use it.
For someone who does know something about programming, it's nice to be shown how to actually use the language to accomplish something interesting, and this book doesn't do that well either. For that, a book usually has some good examples of useful things to do with whatever built-in features the language has, such as regular expressions. Here, the examples for that are short, plain, and don't really show you how to do anything with them except check for single characters, while the explanations get increasingly dense and technical as the examples get shorter - not a good combo no matter what your level of experience.
I wouldn't recommend this as a textbook, and I really wouldn't recommend it for someone trying to learn JavaScript on their own, no matter what their level of experience.
Too many typos
Although the content is for the most part good, I have found after just two chapters that there are so many typos (tags not closed properly, etc.) and left out content (such as CDATA statements,) the lessons end up generating JavaScript errors and don't validate, so you have to go back and modify the script on your own - not an easy task when you are just learning, since you have to research the issue using alternate resources. It appears that the author copy-and-pasted his errors into further examples. In addition, you are asked to type comments that are not explained, so you don't know why you are including them. Also, in one of the Case Projects in chapter 1, you are asked to try to fix a problem that is not addressed until Chapter 2. I am taking JavaScript as a college course, and our class is a little frustrated.
