Room for Both O'Reilly's and This Book on my Bookshelf.
I think the line tends to fall between the programmer types and those of us with less of a comp-sci background on this book. I stepped up to this from Jeremy Keith's DOM Scripting after a wild self-teaching binge and enjoyed reading it. It's considerably less dry than you would expect from a book of its size and I thought the author did a good job of explaining more complex JS topics. That said, some topics were starting to show their age and it's overdue for a new edition.
Overall it's a great introduction to people who want to pick up tricks across the entire gamut of JS and I found myself running into a number of objects and methods I wasn't very familiar with. When I'm looking for new JS ideas I would go to this one and start browsing sections I hadn't read as thoroughly. When I want to know exactly what is up with a given facet of JS, I go to O'Reilly's version, the Definitive Guide.
My copy was from the library unfortunately and I miss it, but I'm still holding out for a third edition as it's getting a bit long in the tooth in some sections, but this is usually obvious (like pre-ajax coverage of the XMLHTTPRequest object).
There is definitely room for both the definitive guide and this JS book on my bookshelf, however, and I personally thought it did a great job on prototypical inheritance for doing OOP-style JS.
Javascript Reference
Arrived in specified time, no issues. Use the book all the time. Pretty good reference.
The Future is here.
The future is Javascript. Being a Microsoft technologies fanatic, I always wanted to make use of the AJAX library. My javascript needed some brusing and this was the book I went after. The complete reference, and a good companion to HTML/XHTML Complete Reference. David Flaganan's book is good too. Both deserve 5 stars.
A decent book
This is a fairly comprehensive book. This is not the best "beginner" book. The "beginner" info is in there - but it's mixed with so much advanced stuff that it can seem overwhelming. If you have previous experience, there's a lot of good stuff here. This is an excellent "second book."
thorough coverage of the language
The text is a very good and complete explanation of JavaScript. It describes the best usage of JavaScript with the latest common browsers at the time of writing (early 2004). There are numerous examples which express the programming ideas in a simple fashion.
If you have programmed in other languages, JavaScript should be an easy learn with this book. Programs written in it tend not to be very long, as they are associated with a single web page. While JavaScript deals nicely with the various objects in a browser, like a window or document, the programs tend to have a procedural flavour.
(10 reviews)
