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JavaScript and DHTML Cookbook
I'll begin my review by making a bold statement -- if you've read and like O'Reilly's Definitive Guides on JavaScript and DHTML, you'll adore this book. I use the word adore very deliberately here, because in my opinion JavaScript & DHTML Cookbook is much easier to love than the gigantic and sometimes monotonous Definitive Guide series. Why, you ask? Let's see -- the book is compact (some 500 pages), concise, and filled with the essence of JavaScript and DHTML as far as what you can create using the language/ technology.
JavaScript & DHTML Cookbook is broken up into 15 chapters, each containing a series of recipes. The chapters are:
- Strings
- Numbers and Dates
- Arrays and Objects
- Variables, Functions, and Flow Control
- Browser Feature Detection
- Managing Browser Windows
- Managing Multiple Frames
- Dynamic Forms
- Managing Events
- Page Navigation Techniques
- Managing Style Sheets
- Visual Effects for Stationary Content
- Positioning HTML Elements
- Creating Dynamic Content
- Dynamic Content Applications
These chapters are used mainly to facilitate the look up of a particular recipe, as each recipe exists and is explained independent of one another. This is consistent with the style of most Cookbooks, and it seems to work well here as well.
If you're a complete novice, you may be wondering at this point the distinction between JavaScript and DHTML. The book doesn't make a conscious effort to differentiate between the two when discussing recipes, and for a good reason. DHTML is basically JavaScript, though the latter draws in your page's HTML and often CSS as well to create something more encompassing.
Ok, on to what's important now -- the recipes themselves. I was expecting a series of flashy, long and tacky JavaScripts you can find in the source of every other site on the web these days, padded with some nonsense accolade like "the web cannot survive without them." Such scripts are mostly counterproductive, and do little to educate a JavaScript learner, let alone a master like myself (hur hur). To my delight, things were the complete opposite. The recipes in JavaScript & DHTML Cookbook are extremely practical, well thought out, and even educational. Discussions like Calculating the Number of Days Between Two Dates, Simulating a Hash Table for Fast Array Lookup, and Transforming XML Data into HTML Tables not only are very useful to the cut-and-paster, they teach even seasoned JavaScripters a thing or two about the language.
The only minor compliant I have with this book is the length of some of the script examples -- they span a little too long to follow effortlessly. The longest script I can recall in the book runs about 5 pages in length. Fortunately, such recipes are few and far in between, and 95 percent of the recipes are extremely short in length and packed with useful information and techniques. For the long scripts, it's easy to see that they exist out of necessity to create and show a fully functional script rather than just to pad pages.
In summary, I walk away from reading JavaScript & DHTML Cookbook with many new tricks up my sleeve, something I had not expected at all. Some good resources online that compliment the reading would be DevEdge's JavaScript Reference and JavaScriptKit's JavaScript tutorials."
You can purchase JavaScript and DHTML Cookbook from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
try this site instead:
http://www.irt.org/index.htm
if you need more help, you should try marketing instead.
Who took my tinfoil hat?
Try cross-browser.com for two cross-browser DHTML Javascript libraries.
One is complete and big, the other is more of a featherweight and a bit less powerful of course.
I liked my next sig a lot better
I got the first Dynamic HTML when it came out then bought the second edition and the JS/DHTML cookbook.
The cookbook is great for newcomers to web development. It is based on common tasks, i.e. "Allowing Only Numbers (or Letters) in a Text Box". It then shows how to combine the HTML, CSS and Javascript to get carry out that task. I can't count how many times that a co-worker has asked me a Javascript question and I've shown them the answer straight out of that book. For programmers new to web development, the largest obstacle isn't HTML or Javascript syntax; it's how to put together those elements. I have yet to see a book that does it as clearly as the the JS and DHTML Cookbook. For someone starting out on their first web based projects, I'd strongly recommend DHTML - the Definitive Guide and the JS/DHTML cookbook as the best references for getting started.
The book has a compatibility legend for each recipe; most of the recipes work with IE 4 and NN 4.
DOM support has become widespread enough that you can easily create DHTML features on a page that will work for over 99% of your visitors. The worst thing so far has been some of the positioning properties; however, some of that is due to the surfeit of properties used by IE.
BTW, you can download example code for this book from here.
I was under the impression that DHTML was just a buzzword. And that when anyone was talking about DHTML what they really meant was HTML pages with JavaScript or VBScript in them to make them do more than static HTML. Am I correct? If I'm wrong - than what the hell is DHTML?
Conserve Oil, Recycle, Boycott Walmart
May I also recommend DOM API. They are even making an effort to make sure Safari is supported (once Apple sticks in a bloody debugger).
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.