Slashdot Mirror
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.
DHTML and javascript make an excellent combination for displaying animated content.. but the question of browser incompatibilty still remains... What we need is a book for making browsers compatible first then have lots of books on the ways to use them... seems logical to me anyway :-)
LOL - Where are the moderation points when you need them!
And it is my site too!
Internet Related Technologies - http://www.irt.org
It seems to be, usually with a follow up post that a different site has it even cheaper then Amazon. I'm curious as to how frequently the ACs involved have some sort of referal system going on, and how that effects the posts rating. Do people usually rate such comments more poorly, or does no one notice/care? If they/you do rate it lower, why? Do you rate other people lower when they are advocating something they have a financial interest in, and if so why are celebrities exempt, such as John Carmack?
Ha ha...See postings above to see irony in the -1 offtopic mod. The guy who gives the amazon post is modded as informative -- gee, who woulda thunk it? "Amazon is selling an O'Reilly book", now that's informative -- and trying to make money off of it too. This last post, which offers a much better retailer (in terms of price), is modded as offtopic. My suggestion? Don't mod these kinds of comments at all. Everyone knows that you can buy books at online retailers.
At least, don't mod them until they create the
+1 Offered Lazy Asses Like Me the Link
moderation.
Karma: Chevy Kavalierma.
Most O'Reilly books are actually less voluminous than comparable computer books from other publishers.
JP
Sure can. You redefine the variable i. Departing radically from /. convention, I actually pasted your code into my trusty text editor to see if there was some cool trick that I didn't notice just reading it & found that it behaved exactly as I expected:
- myfunc1() passes 0 (zero) to myfunc2() on the first iteration of the myfunc1 loop.
- myfunc2() then increments i stepwise to 14 whereupon it returns to myfunc1() & ends because 14 > 10.
In fact, this same code (with slight syntax changes) produces the same result in Perl unless 'i' is localized in each function & the value passed to myfunc2 is handled as @_. I'm pretty certain the result would also be the same in C, but here I bow to laziness &Are you trying to illustrate the sloppy code that happens because JavaScript is easy & free & a bunch of folks with no concept of good coding practice can just kludge away? Or is there something more substantive to the example?
"Obviously, I'm not an IBM computer any more than I'm an ashtray" (Bob Dylan)
a = 1 + 4 would yield a = '14'. Irritating.