Customer Reviews

Supercharged JavaScript Graphics: with HTML5 canvas, jQuery, and More

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The best stuff in this book is how to make javascript do basic DOM manipulation at high speed. It nicely uses jQuery for all the convenience parts of the code that don't affect performance, but combines this with pure DOM attribute manipulation for all the animation parts.

It also includes introductions to the html5 canvas, jQuery-UI and other bits and pieces (html5 sockets, google charts etc). But these are just to give you a flavor and point you in the right direction.

Also liked the nice consistent javascript code style that manages to keep pretty complex code manageable and readable. Great to see how basic DOM manipulation can be used to do something as cool as space-invaders game!

Hmmmm. This book was a bit of mess.

In places, it contains useful tips on using JavaScript and getting the best out of JQuery.

But some of the suggestions are a little bizarre, then quickly swap to a completely different topic. For example, one tip is that if you are currently using a "for" loop in your JavaScript, you could get slightly better performance by simply copying'n'pasting the commands that you're repeating. For example:

Run_Some_Function();
Run_Some_Function();
Run_Some_Function();
Run_Some_Function();
Run_Some_Function();

This is following with a quick look at a graph showing that, actually, this doesn't make much difference - but - hey! - bare it in mind, and then, the author's on to the next topic. And the next. And the next.

It does describe some useful principles, drawing with JQuery Mobile, a bit of HTML 5 Canvas, but overall, the book feels like a collection of slightly-related ideas, thrown together in a book, in the hope that some of them would be useful to a developer. You'll certainly pick up some useful ideas and programming methods, but will need to buy further books to get a real grasp on any of the topics. For example, SVG, which is one of the topics mentioned in the book's title, is summarized in little more than half of a page.