JavaScript & DHTML Cookbook
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Spotlight Customer Reviews
Average Customer Rating: 5Customer Rating: 5
Summary: Indispensable
Comment: As the title says, this is a Cookbook of JavaScript recipes. While it does devote a few chapters at the beginning to the basics of JavaScript, do not expect a book to teach you the basics of JavaScript. However, you can expect the contents to cover a reasonable number of common situations and solutions for enhancing web pages.
The author covers topics including: navigation menus (mouseovers and expandable trees), graphic layering, frames, positioning and dynamic content. In addition, he offers a chapter on style sheets that provides a wonderful resource for this often neglected topic.
Throughout the book the author presents each topic with an overview, followed by selected problems, solutions, code samples and code walk throughs. The prose is concise and well written.
For additional reference on JavaScript, try JavaScript: The Definitive Guide.
Customer Rating: 5
Summary: Very Good
Comment: The JavaScript & DHTML Cookbook is about using javascript and css to create dynamic user interfaces for your web application. Each "recipe" starts with a statement of the problem. This is followed by the solution, which includes the code to make it run. After the solution section, a discussion
section follows. The discussion section includes explanations of why the code works and various alternatives.
The book is broken up into chapters and each chapter consists of recipes that relate to the main topic of the chapter. For every chapter, there is an introduction, which is a very good summary of the DHTML topic. Just reading the chapter introductions would give a high level overview of DHTML.
The recipes are practical solutions for problems that a developer could actually encounter. There are not flashy recipes that are useless. The recipes consist of simple solutions to complex solutions to application problems. The book could be used as a reference to solve a particular problem that you have or the book could be read, especially the discussion sections, to understand how to solve problems with DHTML. The only drawback to using the code for a recipe is that some recipe built on top on other recipes and you need to find the previous recipe.
In summary, I would recommend this book for any client-side web developer.
Customer Rating: 5
Summary: An excellent compilation of useful code snippets.
Comment: I've had the book two days and it has paid for itself a couple times over already. I wish I'd had it about two weeks earlier.
If you 1) already know a programming language such as C (or really, any procedural language for that matter), 2) are new to Javascript and 3) need to do some web programming with Javascript, this book is great. Before I bought it, I tried to figure out some of the stuff myself
(ie common Javascript problems: 'data validation in a textbox in a form','setting the focus','opening a new window','jumping back to the parent window',etc)
by using my Javascript language reference book and looking up the problem on the web. I'd usually find a solution, but if I would have had this book at the time I could have just looked it up and saved myself a load of time.
I'd almost recommend it before a Javascript reference (but you'll eventually need one of those anyway).
So, it will come in the most handy for someone relatively new to Javascript who needs to get up to speed quickly on common Javascript tasks, but will also remain useful even to an expert as a reference book of often needed useful code snippets.