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I enjoy using this book, it interjects light moments into study matter that could be extremely boring.I would recommend to someone who is just begining with Javascript. Purchased this book for a class, also using the HTML book for another. There are a few topics that the book introduce early, early enought that you are lost or confused but they (the authors) will come along later and clear everything up.
Also, there are very important things it teaches that should be stressed a lot harder that aren't and there are things that are stressed- such as CONSTANT- that shouldn't be stressed at all. The book covers some good points and has neat examples, but it teaches you something and then when you need to know another part to understand what it teaches you, it says "don't worry, we'll teach you more about this in 6 chapters." I don't know about you, but if its pertinent to the part I'm learning now, I want to know about it now, not in 6 chapters. I found this book almost totally useless. This book is ok if you like the "new" style of learning it tries to employ. I found it absolutely useless.
I love Head First books, they make learning very dry content quick and fun. Many thanks. large book of java learning fun. Came quickly and in great condition for a used book.
For those complaining about the use of innerHTML which appeared a few times, I didn't really see that as an issue, because they acknowledged that it was not standard (page 352) and once you hit the chapter about the DOM (chapter 8), they offered you a more standardised and accepted alternative to using it, inserting content via DOM nodes. I hadn't touched Javascript for a while and had a bit of an aversion for it while reading dry tomes about the language itself. window and document objects were tackled much later there. I feel confident to tackle my next books in understanding the front end world ( for me it happens to be Object Oriented Javascript by Stefanov, and Head First Ajax)
Additionally, their sections on using firebug and debugging techniques (code commenting, a checklist of common mistakes to check when not sure what's wrong proved valuable). Finally, a lot of this was made bearable in that great Head First teaching style filled with eye catching annotated code, great questions and answers and imaginary dialogues between two similar or contrasting concepts etc. I would have liked to see some coverage of test driven development (Fireunit, JSSpec, jsmock ) but that may be getting greedy for an intro book plus I have yet to see it in other Javascript books I've browsed. I also liked that they weren't afraid to delve into the more advanced and interesting uses of javascript ( function literals and function references (so as to move as much javascript from HTML and into separate javascript files to separate structure from behaviour), callback function (passed over to a sort function for sorting by an object property), prototypes for implementing class methods/properties and object methods/properties, general oop).
It mixes an introduction to Javascript in the web browser (so you get instant viewable satisfaction) with a steady diet of knowledge of the language sprinkled generously all over the place. Chapter 8 explains it well. Books like Javascript, the Definitive Guide, while helpful about the language, were dry in letting one see applications of this language. Thereafter any place that I saw a use of innerHTML, I simply modeled the html into a DOM tree, created the nodes of the tree, and appended that treed as child of the node the innerHTML would have gone to.
, manipulate the DOM to add and remove content). This book was a great remedy to that aversion. This was just what I needed, motivation of seeing what i can do with the language (create interactivity, validate forms, handle mouse and other input events (onclick, onblur.).
Which iRock.js file are we working with.If I could give this book a negative star I would because I now have to re-work my lab sessions so that my students can follow examples instead of having no clue as to what the book is expecting of them. There are no steps to follow, and the book appears to be written as an expository dump. It had interesting chapters, it interspersed lexical JavaScript with DOM very early on and appeared to cover most of what I was planning on teaching. We're now going to look at each chapter, determine what the author is trying to achieve and then go ahead and write our own code. In fact I thought it might be good to re-factor the examples so that the JavaScript sat in it's own file.Unfortunately no one in my class can work with the book, and everything came to a screaming halt in Chapter 2. If I could give this book a negative rating I would.
On the surface this book seemed to fit the bill. Also there is no link from the code you're reading in the chapter with the code in the download. Paul Welch summed the book up very well for chapter 2, so I'm not going to go over everything again. I looked ahead to Chapter 3 and realized it is just the same. Maybe the student's will be better for it. I will however share my experiences with this book.I am teaching JavaScript this semester and I was looking for a suitable text book that had interesting examples that the students could follow.
Apart from using deprecated method calls and writing obtrusive JavaScript I felt we could over-come these.
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