Professional JavaScript for Web Developers (Wrox Programmer to Programmer) eBook: Nicholas C. Zakas: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store

Product Description

Professional JavaScript for Web Developers, 2nd Edition, provides a developer-level introduction along with the more advanced and useful features of JavaScript.

Starting at the beginning, the book explores how JavaScript originated and evolved into what it is today. A detailed discussion of the components that make up a JavaScript implementation follows, with specific focus on standards such as ECMAScript and the Document Object Model (DOM). The differences in JavaScript implementations used in different popular web browsers are also discussed.

Building on that base, the book moves on to cover basic concepts of JavaScript including its version of object-oriented programming, inheritance, and its use in various markup languages such as HTML. An in-depth examination of events and event handling is followed by an exploration of browser detection techniques and a guide to using regular expressions in JavaScript. The book then takes all this knowledge and applies it to creating dynamic user interfaces.

The last part of the book is focused on advanced topics, including performance/memory optimization, best practices, and a look at where JavaScript is going in the future.

This book is aimed at three groups of readers:

Experienced developers familiar with object-oriented programming who are looking to learn JavaScript as it relates to traditional OO languages such as Java and C++
Web application developers attempting to enhance the usability of their web sites and web applications
Novice JavaScript developers aiming to better understand the language

In addition, familiarity with the following related technologies is a strong indicator that this book is for you:

Java
PHP
ASP.NET
HTML
CSS
XML

This book is not aimed at beginners who lack a basic computer science background or those looking to add some simple user interactions to web sites. These readers should instead refer to Wrox’s Beginning JavaScript, 3rd Edition (Wiley, 2007).

This book covers:

What Is JavaScript?—Explains the origins of JavaScript: where it came from, how it evolved, and what it is today. Concepts introduced include the relationship between JavaScript and ECMAScript, the Document Object Model (DOM), and the Browser Object Model (BOM). A discussion of the relevant standards from the European Computer Manufacturer’s Association (ECMA) and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is also included.
JavaScript in HTML—Examines how JavaScript is used in conjunction with HTML to create dynamic web pages. Introduces the various ways of embedding JavaScript into a page, including a discussion surrounding the JavaScript content-type and its relationship to the element.
Language Basics—Introduces basic language concepts, including syntax and flow control statements. Explains the syntactic similarities of JavaScript and other C-based languages and points out the differences. Type coercion is introduced as it relates to built-in operators.
Variables, Scope, and Memory—Explores how variables are handled in JavaScript given their loosely typed nature. A discussion about the differences between primitive and reference values is included, as is information about execution context as it relates to variables. Also, a discussion about garbage collection in JavaScript explains how memory is reclaimed when variables go out of scope.
Reference Types—Covers all of the details regarding JavaScript's built-in reference types, such as Object and Array. Each reference type described in ECMA-262 is discussed both in theory and how they relate to browser implementations.
Object-Oriented Programming—Explains how to use object-oriented programming in JavaScript. Since JavaScript has no concept of classes, several popular techniques are explored for object creation and...

From the Back Cover

Professional JavaScript® for Web Developers, 2nd Edition

If you want to achieve JavaScript′s full potential, it is critical to understand its nature, history, and limitations. This book sets the stage by covering JavaScript from its very beginning to the present–day incarnations that include support for the DOM and Ajax. It also shows you how to extend this powerful language to meet specific needs and create seamless client–server communication without intermediaries such as Java or hidden frames.

You′ll explore basic concepts of JavaScript including its version of object–oriented programming, inheritance, and its use in HTML and XHTML. A detailed discussion of the components that make up a JavaScript implementation follows, with specific focus on standards such as ECMAScript and DOM. All three levels of DOM are explained, including advanced topics such as event simulation, XML parsing, and XPath queries. You′ll also learn how to utilize regular expressions and build dynamic user interfaces. This valuable insight will help you apply JavaScript solutions to the business problems faced by Web developers everywhere.

What you will learn from this book

All of the details regarding JavaScript′s built–in reference types
How to use object–oriented programming in JavaScript
Ways to detect the client machine and its capabilities
Debugging tools and techniques for each browser
Steps for reading and manipulating XML data
How to create a custom event framework
Various techniques for storing data on the client machine
Approaches to working with JavaScript in an enterprise environment

Who this book is for

This book is for Web developers who want to use JavaScript to dramatically improve the usability of their Web sites and Web applications and for those with programming experience, especially object–oriented programming experience.

Wrox Professional guides are planned and written by working programmers to meet the real–world needs of programmers, developers, and IT professionals. Focused and relevant, they address the issues technology professionals face every day. They provide examples, practical solutions, and expert education in new technologies, all designed to help programmers do a better job.

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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful

Complete Coverage 30 Sep 2010

By Mr. M. O'Sullivan

Format:Paperback

For the most part this is an excellent book, the simplicity and clarity of the examples given is mostly excellent, and the coverage feels complete. This book is definitely for experienced JavaScript programmers, and probably other programmers from a similar syntactical based language that will be able to grasp the concepts quickly. Although it does begin with the basics, more as an overview/reminder, it doesn't continue along those lines as you move through the book, for example when covering regular expressions it doesn't tell you why regular expression literals begin and end with a forward slash as you should already know that, equally it doesn't waste time explaining the parts that make up a regular expression, such as repetition characters, position characters etc, as you should already know that too, instead it heads straight into advanced stuff, and this is the case on most topics. The terminology used throughout is definitely aimed at experienced programmers that will instantly understand the commentary; beginners will be baffled as programming terms aren't explained, unless it is specific to JavaScript.

Constructor, prototype, inheritance and many other patterns are discussed with great clarity. Equally the DOM and BOM are very well covered with the many differences amongst the browsers explained with cross browser solutions provided. Events are also given excellent coverage. The theory behind each aspect of JavaScript is often provided, I've always felt such theory is absolutely necessary in order to really get to grips with a language, and this sort of stuff is lacking in many other books, but not here thankfully. You'll walk away not only knowing how to do something and why you should do it that way, but also how it works under the hood.

There are issues (as opposed to downsides), one is that some aspects of the book, especially early on, feel more like you're reading a reference book rather than a tutorial and it does make reading those sections a little difficult from a concentration/interest standpoint due to the dry nature of reference type material. Having said that though it's obvious that completeness was the aim of this book as there is just so much stuff in here, much of it you'll likely never encounter in your working day, although it does leave one feeling somewhat overwhelmed at times. Another potential issue, to those that have no OO programming experience, is that comparisons with JavaScript and OO type features of other languages are made throughout, and again the terminology is applied without explanations, so if you have no OO experience or knowledge you may find parts of the book difficult to understand, clearly the author was trying to anticipate the questions of experienced OO programmers moving over to JavaScript. I call these issues rather than downsides as this is a professional book, in the right target market these issues shouldn't really be a problem.

The area which needs improvement is real-world application of advanced concepts. It's one thing understanding patterns and advanced techniques but knowing when to apply them in a meaningful context is frequently, but not always, lacking. In addition the author will teach a particular concept and then wrap it up in his own utility classes and then throughout the book he'll simply use his utility classes when he needs that particular feature, now this is no doubt the way to do things but whilst I'm learning I would prefer he'd reuse the actual features directly in order to help cement concepts in my mind that I'd previously covered as I go through the book, unfortunately the use of utility classes hides away the concepts you've previously learnt so you have to go back and review. In my view it would have been better if he left his utility classes to the best practices chapter towards the end of the book. On the plus side the author does support the book on the p2p forums and he was extremely helpful and quick to respond when I had questions.

One final note about this book is that it is slightly dated now, for example ECMAScript 4 is referred to in this book as the next standard but this has actually been abandoned for ECMAScript 5, and under EC5 some features have been deprecated in strict mode, such as arguments.callee amongst others, but don't let that put you off as EC5 lacks browser support. For me this book really hits the mark, especially with advanced JavaScript techniques, although I'm going to have to get in lots of practice before I forget it all!

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

Must-read for all professional web developers 16 Nov 2011

By B. Eaton

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

As a sometime web developer I bought the first edition of this book some years ago and even at the time it helped me realise how pitiful my understanding of JavaScript was. I recently purchased the 2nd edition on Kindle and it remains utterly invaluable.

It's written in quite an academic style without being dry, patronising, or smug. The underlying message of the book is that JavaScript is a 'proper' programming language with as well-established a set of patterns and tools as any other. Several chapters are given over to explaining core concepts such as variable scope, function declarations, and (very importantly) object-oriented programming in JavaScript. It is worth purchasing just for the best practice approach that it advocates (with clear examples). I particularly like the way that the author details the steps leading up a particular best practice (done brilliantly in the chapters on objects and inheritance). It is important to stress that this is not some abstract waffle, it is real-world stuff that you can use in professional web development projects.

Coverage of the BOM, DOM, and related eventing, is thorough, including the quirks of different browsers. Admittedly a lot of this is subsumed by toolsets such as jQuery, but it is very useful to understand what JavaScript can actually do in the browser. Also, although scant coverage is given to the full power of Ajax, this doesn't undermine the value of the book (and there is a chapter on the XMLHttpRequest which gives more than enough information to get started). There are also excellent chapters on maintainability, performancec, best practices, and third-party frameworks.

I really can't recommend this book enough. Given the amount of hacked and inline code I regularly see, this needs to be read by more developers.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

Good book but for experienced JavaScript developers 15 Oct 2011

By Marcin Dancewicz

I just wanted to point out that this book became useful for me only after I went through more basic JavaScript. If you're a JavaScript newbie like I was when I first grabbed the book - better start from a different publication (perhaps JavaScript: The Definitive Guide or some kind of "for beginners", "missing guide" or etc.). But yes, it's great and useful once you know the subject.