The Book of Javascript, 2nd Edition: A Practical Guide to Interactive Web Pages

I recently became interested in learning JavaScript. The only practical experience with it came from using applications such as Adobe ImageReady to generate it for me. I began by searching Webmonkey.com. I discovered their a awesome tutorial series written by Thau!. I completed these tutorials in 3 days and was hungry for more.I discovered his book that weekend. The book reads very well and keeps you interested with real world examples. If you are looking for a be all end all source on JavaScript buy an O'reily book. But, if you are looking for a good place to start, Thau!'s book is the one to buy.Don't take my word for it, go to webmonkey.com and search for JavaScript tutorials and sample some of his work.Thanks Thau!

I've been wanting to improve my web pages and knew that JavaScript was the way to go, but I couldn't get my brain around it. I took a three hour seminar on JavaScript last year and came out of it completely confused. After reading the reviews of this book, I thought I'd give JavaScript another try.From the first pages of the book, I knew I had made the right choice. David Thau has written a very informative tutorial for JavaScript novices like me. I am not "mega-geeky" so the informal and humorous tone makes it easy to read. The examples are clear and simple to follow. Though some of the example web pages he points the reader to have changed since the time of the book's printing, they are still available via the cd-rom included with the book.This book is an excellent choice for anyone wanting to learn JavaScript!!

This book is geared towards beginning programmers. In this regard, it's a great book and is good at teaching the basics of JavaScript. However, if you're an experienced programmer, you may want something more to the point. The author does a good job of talking about programming for various browsers and pitfalls to look out for, and will get you up to speed with JavaScript quickly.Because this book is a tutorial, the author recommends picking up another JavaScript book for reference, and I agree. Read (or skim if you're not new to programming) through the book and do the exercises to get a feel for the language, then refer to a JavaScript reference book for more technical details and comprehensive information.

This book goes well beyond the typical "how-to" JavaScript book. After spending the first few pages explaining the history and basics of the language, David Thau mixes up the tutorials with real life JavaScript examples from sites like Sun, HotMail, and Pets.com. He carefully walks through all the code and explains everything. Thau is a great writer. I remember him from his days at WebMonkey.com and his JavaScript tutorials from that site taught me and I'm sure many others how to script. As he did with the online tutorials, this book does a thorough job covering all the basics like variables, strings, arrays, functions, etc. On the downside, there is nothing here for the advanced JavaScripter (check out O'Reilly's JavaScript Cookbook for that), but if you are a beginner or even an intermediate JavaScripter, this book is an excellent choice, and does a much better job teaching JavaScript than other entry level books, like "Teach Yourself JavaScript 1.3 in 24 Hours" or "JavaScript for Dummies."

How helpful is this book? When I was beginning to tackle the extremely picky Cookie function techniques in the JavaScript core language I needed to understand them enough to be able to support a shopping cart that can carry large amounts of data. This book has the best Cookie functions examples that I could find, not only are the functions inspirational, but they are also very easy to understand. I am also glad that Thau decided to leave out most of the HTML (the larger examples do include HTML) and just show the JavaScript, the reason that this is helpful is that in JavaScript: The Definitive Guide (Which is the most in depth JavaScript Core language tutorial, which I also recommend if you want to be an expert at client side JavaScript) has the HTML included which is good in some cases, so that you can understand how to implement the examples into your pages, but in a situation where I want to understand how to talk to the document.cookie all the HTML makes it very hard to understand. Reference - quality / speed: The reference in this book doesn't touch that of JavaScript: The Definitive Guide in order to find something you must first go to the index and find the page number. In the Definitive Guide you just go to the appendix and the top of the page has what you want in alphabetical order. The speed to look something up is too slow. If you want the best reference in most common client side programming get the DHTML Definitive Reference, this one has everything and is organized perfectly. Core Language: Sorry beginners, but you won't be experts at JavaScript from this book alone. This is only a beginning there is a lot more to this simple language than this small book, but the examples are some of the easiest to learn from (I love that fact and you will also). Beginners - Must have. Experts - Consider this book in time of small misunderstandings.