JavaScript and DHTML Cookbook

Adios077 (Ada Shimar) writes "Ok, so I was reluctant when I first picked up and started reading O'Reilly's JavaScript & DHTML Cookbook. After all, I'm fairly proficient in JavaScript already (yes, get in line to hire me!), and if I needed some cool DHTML scripts, I could just visit a good site like Dynamic Drive. However, the book managed to both surprise and impress me, a great combination to have in a book." Find out why by reading the rest of Shimar's review, below. JavaScript and DHTML Cookbook author Danny Goodman pages 576 publisher O'Reilly & Associates rating 8.5 reviewer Ada Shimar ISBN 0596004672 summary A surprisingly useful JavaScript book, even for people skilled with the language already.

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:

1. Strings
2. Numbers and Dates
3. Arrays and Objects
4. Variables, Functions, and Flow Control
5. Browser Feature Detection
6. Managing Browser Windows
7. Managing Multiple Frames
8. Dynamic Forms
9. Managing Events
10. Page Navigation Techniques
11. Managing Style Sheets
12. Visual Effects for Stationary Content
13. Positioning HTML Elements
14. Creating Dynamic Content
15. 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.

Comments

Who needs a book?

[calebtucker]

Seriously, who needs a javascript and dhtml book with all of the references on the net? Just give me a nice object reference for DHTML (*cough*, MSDN isn't bad.. i hate to admit it) and DevGuru's JavaScript reference.

Re:DHTML and javascript

[DrSkwid]

javascript is polymorphic

you can code round different browsers by implementing a common API for your applications and let your library do the platform specific work

I've done plenty of intranet javascipt applications, one of which is an HTML email composer.
It uses DHTML to drag and resize the html elements around. It works like Quark, you draw a square and type in the text.

"Often with CSS"?

[SvendTofte]

"often with CSS"? That doesn't even make sense.

DHTML was coined, as the combination of HTML providing structure, CSS providing presentation, and JavaScript providing logic.

If you just use HTML and JavaScript, you're just doing a plain HTML page with logic (like form checkers).

I would also note, that JavaScript object are already hash tables, so "simulating hash arrays" isn't really needed (or I fail to see where it becomes relevant?)

object["myprop"] == object.myprop

There's only one book JavaScript programmers need, the rhino book. It's all in that. Everything else is just experience, and cannot be conveyed by a bunch of scripts. Or if it can convey something, it's most likely because said reader didn't catch it in the Rhino book ;)