JavaScript for Absolute Beginners
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Product Description
Product Description
If you are new to both JavaScript and programming, this hands-on book is for you. Rather than staring blankly at gobbledygook, you'll explore JavaScript by entering and running hundreds of code samples in Firebug, a free JavaScript debugger. Then in the last two chapters, you'll leave the safety of Firebug and hand-code an uber cool JavaScript application in your preferred text editor.
Written in a friendly, engaging narrative style, this innovative JavaScript tutorial covers the following essentials:
- Core JavaScript syntax, such as value types, operators, expressions, and statements provided by ECMAScript.
- Features for manipulating XHTML, CSS, and events provided by DOM.
- Object-oriented JavaScript, including prototypal and classical inheritance, deep copy, and mixins.
- Closure, lazy loading, advance conditional loading, chaining, currying, memoization, modules, callbacks, recursion, and other powerful function techniques.
- Encoding data with JSON or XML.
- Remote scripting with JSON-P or XMLHttpRequest
- Drag-and-drop, animated scrollers, skin swappers, and other cool behaviors.
- Optimizations to ensure your scripts run snappy.
- Formatting and naming conventions to prevent you from looking like a greenhorn.
- New ECMAScript 5, DOM 3, and HTML 5 features such as Object.create(), Function.prototype.bind(), strict mode, querySelector(), querySelectorAll(), and getElementsByClassName().
As you can see, due to its fresh approach, this book is by no means watered down. Therefore, over the course of your journey, you will go from JavaScript beginner to wizard, acquiring the skills recruiters desire.
What you’ll learn
Who this book is for
This book is aimed at anybody who wants to learn how to use JavaScript to create more interactive and stickier web sites.
Table of Contents
- Representing Data with Values
- Type Conversion
- Operators
- Controlling Flow
- Member Inheritance
- Functions and Arrays
- Traversing and Modifying the DOM Tree
- Scripting CSS
- Listening for Events
- Scripting BOM
About the Author
Terry McNavage has been hand-coding JavaScript for 12 years. In addition to being a JavaScript wizard, he has expertise in creative design, XHTML, CSS, PHP, Perl, and MySQL. Terry is an elite runner, too. For the past 14 years, he has run 100 or more miles per week over the hilly terrain of Pittsburgh. He is also a bit of a foodie. Though his Pirates have had 18 losing seasons in a row, Terry remains hopeful they'll raise the Jolly Roger more often than the white flag in 2011.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
One point of clarification at the start: when the book title speaks of "absolute beginners", it not only means absolute beginners with regards to JavaScript, but also absolute beginners with regards to programming.
Perhaps this is obvious -- feel free to call me stupid, but it wasn't obvious to me when Apress invited me to review this title. I thought the book may also be useful for people who don't know JavaScript but have previous programming experience. I don't think it is. I suppose you could try to quickly skim through the first five to six chapters, or look for a concise JavaScript introduction elsewhere and start this book halfway through, but there's probably books that do a better job of targeting this group of readers.
So, dear absolute beginners: You probably want to learn JavaScript to make your web pages more dynamic. Be prepared for some 250 pages of learning a programming language before you'll see the first line of HTML. Data types, operators, boolean logic, loops, the whole lot. Think about whether this approach works for you -- there are other books that take a different route and let you play with HTML pretty much from the start.
The author will do his best to make this bit accessible, and perhaps even fun. His tone is light and conversational.
Yet going through the first 200 pages or so left me dissatisfied, and it took me a while to understand why.
I think for me, the book is not systematic enough. This is probably intentional -- the description says that it "avoids bombarding you with unnecessary technical details". That's a worthy goal, but I found myself longing precisely for more details and structure.
Let me try to illustrate what I mean with the start of chapter 6. It starts with the heading "Why Use Functions?", followed by a recipe for making ice cream that stretches out over a whole page. Variations of that recipe -- vanilla, coffee, and chocolate -- are then used to illustrate why you would want to use functions.
What follows, in the same amount of space devoted to the ice cream recipe earlier, is a very compressed explanation of first-class functions and function declarations vs function expressions. In its compressed form, I find it extremely difficult to follow; in fact, it boils down to the author saying: "You won't understand it, just trust me on this one."
I am the kind of reader who is irritated by this sort of stuff. There's apparently a distinction there that's at least somewhat important, but it isn't properly explained, and it feels like I'm supposed to just nod politely and move on. Perhaps spending less space on recipes and more on explaining some of these concepts would have been appropriate.
If you think that you're a reader with a similar personality to mine, consider Christian Heilmann's Beginning JavaScript with DOM Scripting & Ajax: From Novice to Professional (Beginning: From Novice to Professional), also from Apress. I really liked that one.
Perhaps this is obvious -- feel free to call me stupid, but it wasn't obvious to me when Apress invited me to review this title. I thought the book may also be useful for people who don't know JavaScript but have previous programming experience. I don't think it is. I suppose you could try to quickly skim through the first five to six chapters, or look for a concise JavaScript introduction elsewhere and start this book halfway through, but there's probably books that do a better job of targeting this group of readers.
So, dear absolute beginners: You probably want to learn JavaScript to make your web pages more dynamic. Be prepared for some 250 pages of learning a programming language before you'll see the first line of HTML. Data types, operators, boolean logic, loops, the whole lot. Think about whether this approach works for you -- there are other books that take a different route and let you play with HTML pretty much from the start.
The author will do his best to make this bit accessible, and perhaps even fun. His tone is light and conversational.
Yet going through the first 200 pages or so left me dissatisfied, and it took me a while to understand why.
I think for me, the book is not systematic enough. This is probably intentional -- the description says that it "avoids bombarding you with unnecessary technical details". That's a worthy goal, but I found myself longing precisely for more details and structure.
Let me try to illustrate what I mean with the start of chapter 6. It starts with the heading "Why Use Functions?", followed by a recipe for making ice cream that stretches out over a whole page. Variations of that recipe -- vanilla, coffee, and chocolate -- are then used to illustrate why you would want to use functions.
What follows, in the same amount of space devoted to the ice cream recipe earlier, is a very compressed explanation of first-class functions and function declarations vs function expressions. In its compressed form, I find it extremely difficult to follow; in fact, it boils down to the author saying: "You won't understand it, just trust me on this one."
I am the kind of reader who is irritated by this sort of stuff. There's apparently a distinction there that's at least somewhat important, but it isn't properly explained, and it feels like I'm supposed to just nod politely and move on. Perhaps spending less space on recipes and more on explaining some of these concepts would have been appropriate.
If you think that you're a reader with a similar personality to mine, consider Christian Heilmann's Beginning JavaScript with DOM Scripting & Ajax: From Novice to Professional (Beginning: From Novice to Professional), also from Apress. I really liked that one.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
9 reviews
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful
JavaScript for beginners and professionals alike
16 Jan 2011
Format:Paperback
I'm primarily an HTML and CSS developer, but increasingly I need to work with JavaScript to meet the requirements of my employer. I often use the jQuery library, which is great for performing specific tasks it is designed to do, such as making selections and simplifying animations and ajax. However, without a strong programming background, I often find it hard to keep up with my peers.
JavaScript for Absolute Beginners has changed that. I now have the vocabulary and understanding of the language that I need to communicate with my co-workers and work together on more advanced scripts. I'm now comfortable with Object Oriented Programming concepts, as well as the JavaScript syntax.
This book has too much information to absorb in a single pass. I will surely return to it in the future as I gain more experience working with the concepts I learned from my initial read. The first six chapters focus on JavaScript programming concepts and syntax. The final four chapters are a practical guide to using JavaScript to manipulate HMTL and CSS.
Despite the title "for absolute beginners", if you've never worked with JavaScript before, you may want to start with Jeremy Keith's "DOM Scripting", or any number of jQuery (or another JavaScript library) titles. This book contains so much information, it may be intimidating to someone who is trying to get up and running with JavaScript for the first time. However, after taking those baby steps, this books should be your next read.
Furthermore, this book is not just for beginners. Anyone who wants a better understanding of programming concepts, the JavaScript language, and how to use JavaScript with HTML and CSS should surely read.
JavaScript for Absolute Beginners has changed that. I now have the vocabulary and understanding of the language that I need to communicate with my co-workers and work together on more advanced scripts. I'm now comfortable with Object Oriented Programming concepts, as well as the JavaScript syntax.
This book has too much information to absorb in a single pass. I will surely return to it in the future as I gain more experience working with the concepts I learned from my initial read. The first six chapters focus on JavaScript programming concepts and syntax. The final four chapters are a practical guide to using JavaScript to manipulate HMTL and CSS.
Despite the title "for absolute beginners", if you've never worked with JavaScript before, you may want to start with Jeremy Keith's "DOM Scripting", or any number of jQuery (or another JavaScript library) titles. This book contains so much information, it may be intimidating to someone who is trying to get up and running with JavaScript for the first time. However, after taking those baby steps, this books should be your next read.
Furthermore, this book is not just for beginners. Anyone who wants a better understanding of programming concepts, the JavaScript language, and how to use JavaScript with HTML and CSS should surely read.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Spare me
9 May 2011
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
For absolute beginners this book is NOT. I would recommend JavaScript, A Beginner's Guide for those who truly are absolute beginners. I was so lost within pages of this book, it wasn't even funny. If you have prior coding experience, then I'm sure this book is a good way to learn JavaScript, but from a blank slate point of view, this book is way too advanced for beginners.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Not the Apress quality I was expecting
21 Aug 2011
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
The way McNavage wrote this book is quite interesting. He spends the first 150 pages talking about the basics such as types, "if" statements, and loops. His explanations on these chapters were overkill and I was glad to get through them and move onto the more interesting topics. However, in the more advanced chapters his explanations became short and rushed. He constantly used syntax that was simply not explained requiring me to go online and look up what those keywords actually told JavaScript to do. This process of needing to go online to look up additional information just to understand examples became expected and very frustrating. You can tell McNavage definitely knows his stuff but fails to look at his writings from a Beginner/Learner perspective. I found his examples about his personal hobbies and interests unnecessary and more distracting compared to the use of simple and clear examples. At some points he takes up an entire page just talking to you about his life and how it applies to the upcoming examples. Using objects to model Ben & Jerry's ice cream flavors and ingredients just became annoying and cumbersome on the pages. The book also has a large amount of obvious typos that continually had me guessing if what I was reading was actually correct. I did like how past code that was used in current examples was reprinted on the page so you did not have to flip back to previous pages. I enjoyed the book at many points and have definitely learned a lot. The book as a whole did not have the Apress quality that I was expecting but overall I would recommend the book if you are willing to work hard at understanding the examples and text.
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