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#1 (permalink)   03-07-2010 dognose Active Member Company name: Laserdog Productions   Join Date: Jan 2009 Location: Lafayette, CO Posts: 856 BOOK REVIEW - JavaScript Demystified: A Self Teaching Guide JavaScript Demystified: A Self Teaching Guide by Jim Keogh JavaScript Demystified: A Self Teaching Guide provides a hands on approach to writing scripts, with step-by-step instructions on how to add interactive features to your HTML website, such as alert boxes, mouse rollovers, and form validation. While JavaScript does have a server-side version, this book's focus is entirely on client-side scripting. There are quizzes at the end of each chapter to test your knowledge and a final exam at the end of the book. Additionally, all the examples in the book can be downloaded from the publisher's website, saving you the time of typing. There are a significant number of ways you can use JavaScript to make your web pages dynamic. You can display alert boxes, write messages to the browser status bar, open new browser windows, validate form information, perform calculations, create mouse rollovers, set date and time and identify browsers and plug-ins such as Flash. What JavaScript cannot do is read or write files to your hard drive, close browser windows other than those that JavaScript opened, write server-side code, and read information from a web page that resides on a domain different from the domain where the JavaScript resides. Although a limited-featured programming language, JavaScript is an Object Oriented Programming language (OOP). Because OOP may be new to many web developers, chapters 1-7 cover basic programming concepts, using JavaScript examples to show how these features are implemented and how you can apply them to your website. Concepts covered include variables, operators and expressions, conditional statements, arrays, functions, string manipulation and forms and events. If you have designed or developed a website, the remainder of the book covers topics that you are probably more familiar with: cookies, manipulating browser windows, mouse rollovers, ways to use the status bar and slide shows to communicate messages to your visitors, menus and DHTML. The chapter on menus was my favorite. The author provides examples of several types of DHTML menus that are intriguing, and while he doesn't provide the code for them, he does provide a link to a site (www.dynamicdrive.com) that has the code needed to create all the menus shown in the book. In fact, the site has many samples of all types of cool DHTML scripts that would greatly enhance any website. One final note: While much of the JavaScript code is performed on the client system, some of the features covered in this book require a Common Gateway Interface program - CGI - programs that are capable of accessing the host server. Examples of this type of program are PHP, Perl, JSP, and ASP. CGI is outside the scope of this book. Pros 1. JavaScript Demystified would be a great primer for those interested in learning OOP, while upgrading their web site at the same time. Cons 1. While script is provided for the examples, they are stand-alone - in other words, you don't get to see the examples integrated into an entire web page. While this is acceptable for most of the topics, some topics would have benefited from more thorough examples. Overall, Laserdog gives this book two wags of the tail out of a possible three! The first edition of this book was published in 2005 and has 375 pages. The price of the book is $14.93. Click here to buy the book! Do you have any thoughts, queries, or feedback on Javascript Demystified? Share your comments or questions by replying directly to this thread! __________________ Lezly Harrison Laserdog Productions - Code that Doesn't Bite

#2 (permalink)   04-07-2010 Tess Senior Member Company name: Codehead, LLP Latest blog post: SEO Q&A   Join Date: Apr 2007 Location: Portland, OR Posts: 9,131 Blog Entries: 3 Re: JavaScript Demystified: A Self Teaching Guide We use a lot of JavaScript in our work - to put it very simply, it allows you to do tons of really cool things with your web pages and is a great way to step up your development skills. This sounds like a good starting point for someone wanting to learn. Thanks for reviewing this title for us Lezly! It's great to have more technical titles to choose from in the Book Reviews section. __________________ Create a welcome packet for new clients with this guide and free templates! (Available in PDF and Kindle versions)

#3 (permalink)   04-07-2010 dognose Active Member Company name: Laserdog Productions   Join Date: Jan 2009 Location: Lafayette, CO Posts: 856 Re: JavaScript Demystified: A Self Teaching Guide My web development training has all been server side programming, but after reading this book I realized there is a lot you can do on the client & take the load off the server. I have a new book on DOM scripting with some really cool projects! I'm chompin' at the bit to dig into that one, but I've got other priorities that are keeping me from it. Ack! If a Genie offered me three wishes, one of them would be to get by on just a couple of hours of sleep a night! __________________ Lezly Harrison Laserdog Productions - Code that Doesn't Bite