Sams Teach Yourself JavaScript in 21 Days
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Spotlight Customer Reviews
Average Customer Rating: 3.57Customer Rating: 3
Summary: Doorstopper. Not worth it.
Comment: I thought this book was pretty good, when I first started. Because I was able to do a little something with Javascript and I've never even really tried a scripting or programming language before (I know HTML, buts thats just markup). But I put this book on the back burner after I learned what I wanted from Javascript (and really hit the wall after not being able to really use it much more after that). So I started learning Actionscript, where I saw more opportunites for its use. I got "Actionscript: The Definitive Guide" by Colin Moock, and I was actually enlightened. Everything was so much clearer. Actionscript and Javascript are very similar, and when I do write scripts with Javascript and need help, this book "Sams Teach Yourself Javascript in 21 Days" never helps me, I have to use Colin Moock's ACTIONSCRIPT BOOK and I find what I need.
The back appendix of this book, "Javascript in 21 Days", where it is supposed to list methods/functions/etc. is useless. Why even have it there? Moock's actionscript book has an appendix that you can actually use for reference (descriptions, examples, usefull)
I wish I knew all this before I bought this particular Javascript book. I suggest O'Reilly's "Javascript: The Definitive Guide", if it is half as good as Moock's "Actionscript: The Definitive Guide", you'll be all set.
Customer Rating: 4
Summary: Great for beginners, too slow for experienced programmers
Comment: I found this book very useful, and I was able to learn JavaScript from it, although I didn't follow the book's tutorials sequentially.
The most important thing to note is that this book is not really suitable for an experienced programmer who wants to add JavaScript to the list of programming languages that he/she knows. If you already know several other programming languages then you'll find the pace of this book much too slow. There are too many simple examples and too much discussion of basic programming principles.
For a beginning programmer these many examples and down-to-earth discussions are great. The authors assume that the reader has no knowledge of programming at all, which is fine if the reader is new to programming.
A couple of the especially useful things I found in this book were an example showing a clever way of using the onClick event for an "a" tag, and information about where to find the Microsoft script debugger.
On the other hand, I did find a few minor errors. And on page 20 a CD-ROM is mentioned, but in fact no CD-ROM accompanies the book. Instead, as explained on page 5, the sample files from the book are available on the Internet.
So if you're new to programming then this is a good book for you, but if you're an experienced programmer then you should find something else.
Rennie Petersen
Customer Rating: 3
Summary: Good But.....
Comment: I thought the book was good but was a little bit too wordy. I didn't see why there needed to be so many examples on everything; but I guess that's good if you are new to programming. This book wasn't exactly what I was looking for but served its purpose. It was much better then SAMS "Teach Yourself JavaScript in 24 Hours" which had errors in it. Although I didn't care for the books wordiness it was filled with useful information and I did enjoy the chapter of SVG.