Good if you need one of the tricks.
I should preface my review by saying that I generally love the sitepoint books. Simply Javascript (also co-authored by Adams) is hands down the best programming book I've ever read. That said, this book isn't really so much a "book" as it is a "handy reference." If you skim this book and find something you need, then you may be able to justify the cost. As a cover-to-cover read, it's definitely lacking and will leave you wanting. Taken as individual chapters, the writing is excellent and the solutions offer solid coding practices. My recommendation would be to find this book in a bookstore, skim the table of contents and chapters, and see if you will actually use any of the included solutions before you buy.
Just What I Needed
I purchased this book out of desperation after using a 1000 page Javascript Wrox book published in 2000 that was worse than useless. The author's blog posting here is very accurate: it is a modern javascript book that gives usable solutions and concepts that work well. I recommend this book to anyone who has at least some programming background and is sick of cut and pasting garbage code from other mickey mouse tutorial sites that break at the slightest change. It is also a great start for working with AJAX, which is what I needed it for.
That said, the book is surprisingly a great read. I am reading this book cover to cover and also use it as an every day reference with dozens of tips. It is obvious the authors have worked extensively with web sites and write from experience. Thanks for a job well done!
Javascript 4 U
This is an excellent next-step up from an introduction to Javascript and looks at its use in real world situations. You will need to be reasonably fluent in the language to get the best out of it.
The book presents a topic as a question and then presents code to action that query as a solution, then goes through that code in a discussion section. This is where I have a relatively minor criticism of this book; the necessities of discussing the code do not always mesh well with the question and answer format of the layout.
The authors have gone to great effort to ensure that the book is as up-to-date as possible, though this is a rapidly moving target of course, and detail how to ensure that the code will run on as many platforms as possible, rarely giving up and saying 'forget it..', though this proved necessary in a number of the more esoteric options and older browsers.
A highly recommended read if you are looking for a quick solution, or a detailed understanding of what's going on.
The most useful JavaScript book on my shelf
I didn't really think I needed this book -- I have sever other JavaScript books, including the O'Reilly JavaScript Cookbook, and it seemed like this would just be a duplication. But I kept reading really positive reviews of this and other SitePoint books on sites that I trusted, so I decided to take a flier on it.
I'm really glad I did. Unlike some of the O'Reilly books, which are dated at this point, this has really up-to-date, professional code that incorporates best practices. Depending on what kind of JavaScript code base you need to integrate with, you may be able to use this code as-is in many instances. Even if you need to modify it for your own uses, you will never find poorly-organized hackwork here.
Also nice is the up-to-date topic selection. Classics like DOM, form validation, drop-down menus, and cookies are supplemented with topics about accessibility, XMLHttpRequest, in-page dialogs, and using class prototypes. When the authors tell you how to launch popups, they also tell you about all the pitfalls and problems.
No cookbook is going to cover ever possible topic (personally, I would have liked to see JSON examples), but this one is about as complete as you could reasonably ask for. Really, the only downside about this book that I can see is that you need to have at least an intermediate understanding of JavaScript to understand what's going on. There isn't a lot of handholding, and you will likely want to own both a good tutorial and a solid reference on JavaScript and spend some time with them before you're ready for this book. But if you have a good working knowledge of JavaScript and are looking for practical, well-written examples of how to incorporate new techniques into your code, you won't find a better book than this one.
Good and elegant book
It is a good book with useful tips and tricks.
the authors use an elegant way to catch the target.
