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JavaScript: The Definitive Guide: Activate Your Web Pages (Definitive Guides) Review
Readers should note that most of the reviews of this book refer to older editions which are -- due to the rapid evolution of javascript -- completely different books. I've spent a considerable amount of time the last few months reading the 6th edition of this book and have a number of complaints. But first, the kudos: this book is more comprehensive than any other javascript reference.Complaints:
- the text is frequently non-linear in the sense that author will talk about undefined feature X, stating that feature X will be explained a couple of chapters later. Sometimes this is a good way to gradually introduce concepts, but it's used too much here. Some critics of this book have suggested you need to know javascript before reading this book, this might be why.
- Almost every concept is followed with the caveat "but this feature doesn't work in Internet Explorer prior to version Z. For that you have to use this entirely different function f". This makes the text unnecessarily confusing. How about talking about *standard* ECMAscript and relegating the caveats to end of chapter notes, perhaps adding a superscript to alert the reader about version incompatibilities?
- The examples are poor -- most show how to re-implement javascript 5 functions in javascript 3, or how to get a standard function to work in Internet Explorer 8. Who cares? This is why we have jQuery and Dojo -- in order not to worry about stuff like this. A few examples like this would provide welcome insight into dealing with compatibility issues, but in this case my eyes started to glaze over after a few hundred pages.
Case study: Chapter 17, "Handling Events". After reading much of this chapter I realized I didn't know anything about how to use events in actual, practical code. I went back to re-read the chapter, which starts on p. 445. The first example "snippet" doesn't occur until p. 457 and the first real example is on p. 466, demonstrating a "whenReady" function which shows you how "you can improve the startup time of your web applications if you trigger your scripts on events other than 'load'." Somewhat interesting, but is this really the best first example on event processing? The next example illustrates dragging an object, and is already quite complex and hard to follow.
The beginning of Ch. 17 tells us "An event object is an object that is associated with a particular event and contains details
about that event. Event objects are passed as an argument to the event handler function (except in IE8 and before where they are sometimes only available through the global variable event). All event objects have a type property that specifies the event type and
a target property that specifies the event target. (In IE8 and before, use srcElement instead of target.) Each event type defines a set of properties for its associated event." OK, how about an EXAMPLE illustrating how this works in real code? It's nearly impossible to get much out of this comment (and certainly impossible to retain anything) without an example. Only someone who already knows this stuff will follow that effectively, and if you already know the material, why read this chapter?
Additionally, some standard methods appear not to be documented in the client-side reference. Unfortunately I can't recall which ones at the moment; just remember looking for them and not finding them.
The "camel" book "Programming Perl" by Wall, Christiansen, and Orwant continues to be the gold standard for programming books by almost any measure, despite the fact that the current edition (3rd) is now terribly out of date. This book is readable, starts out with a good overview and then gradually dips the reader into the complexities of the language, included good examples, and frankly is an extremely enjoyable read. By comparison, this book meets none of these metrics. As a side note, O'Reilly (also the publisher of Programming Perl) used to be the dominant technical book publisher by huge margins, but in the past few years has begun to fall behind newer, more nimble competitors like Packt and Manning, who offer steep discounts on ebook editions and who appear to be taking greater care to maintain content quality. The affect is that at one time I would have simply assumed that the O'Reilly title was the highest quality text on any particular issue and now I'm finding this is not the case more often than not.
I must also add that I'm a fairly experienced programmer with some prior javascript experience; hence presumably a member of the target audience for this book. Whatever it's shortcomings and merits, and as other reviewers have pointed out, this book is COMPLETELY inappropriate for novice programmers and beginners. Stay far away, newbies, lest you burn in the pit of doom.
JavaScript: The Definitive Guide: Activate Your Web Pages (Definitive Guides) Overview
Since 1996, JavaScript: The Definitive Guide has been the bible for JavaScript programmers—a programmer's guide and comprehensive reference to the core language and to the client-side JavaScript APIs defined by web browsers.
The 6th edition covers HTML5 and ECMAScript 5. Many chapters have been completely rewritten to bring them in line with today's best web development practices. New chapters in this edition document jQuery and server side JavaScript. It's recommended for experienced programmers who want to learn the programming language of the Web, and for current JavaScript programmers who want to master it.
"A must-have reference for expert JavaScript programmers...well-organized and detailed." --Brendan Eich, creator of JavaScript, CTO of Mozilla
"I made a career of what I learned from JavaScript: The Definitive Guide." -- Andrew Hedges, Tapulous
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