Product Description

* Dispels the myth that JavaScript is a "baby" language and demonstrates why it is the scripting language of choice used in the design of millions of Web pages and server-side applications
* Quickly covers JavaScript basics and then moves on to more advanced topics such as object-oriented programming, XML, Web services, and remote scripting
* Addresses the many issues that Web application developers face, including internationalization, security, privacy, optimization, intellectual property issues, and obfuscation
* Builds on the reader's basic understanding of HTML, CSS, and the Web in general

This book is also available as part of the 4-book JavaScript and Ajax Wrox Box (ISBN: 0470227818). This 4-book set includes:

• Professional JavaScript for Web Developers (ISBN: 0764579088)
• Professional Ajax 2nd edition (ISBN: 0470109491)
• Professional Web 2.0 Programming (ISBN: 0470087889)
• Professional Rich Internet Applications: Ajax and Beyond (ISBN: 0470082801)

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #84217 in Books
• Published on: 2005-04-22
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 672 pages

Download Description
* Dispels the myth that JavaScript is a ""baby"" language and demonstrates why it is the scripting language of choice used in the design of millions of Web pages and server-side applications * Quickly covers JavaScript basics and then moves on to more advanced topics such as object-oriented programming, XML, Web services, and remote scripting * Addresses the many issues that Web application developers face, including internationalization, security, privacy, optimization, intellectual property issues, and obfuscation * Builds on the reader's basic understanding of HTML, CSS, and the Web in general

From the Back Cover
Professional JavaScript for Web Developers

JavaScript is an important feature of every major browser because it enables enhanced user interaction on both Web sites and Web applications. While exploring everything from its history to today's advanced features, this book shows you how to use this powerful language to its full potential in order to develop your own applications that solve the business problems facing Web developers today.

You'll gain a clear understanding of the components that make up a JavaScript implementation, plus you'll examine critical areas including events, regular expressions, and browser detection techniques so that you can build dynamic user interfaces. You'll also learn how to extend the language to meet your specific requirements as well as create seamless client-server communication without intermediaries such as Java or hidden frames.

What you will learn from this book

• ECMAScript basics, object-oriented programming techniques, and important Document Object Model (DOM) concepts
• How to implement regular expressions for data validation and string manipulation
• Methods for handling events to tie JavaScript to a Web user interface
• Techniques for validating data, sorting tables, and dealing with errors
• How to communicate between JavaScript and browser plugins
• All about security issues, optimization, and intellectual property protections

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.

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.

About the Author
Nicholas C. Zakas has a BS in Computer Science from Merrimack College and an MBA from Endicott College. He is the author of Professional JavaScript for Web Developers (Wiley 2005), Professional Ajax (1st and 2nd editions, Wiley 2007 and 2007) as well as several online articles. Nicholas works for Yahoo! as a frontend engineer and has worked in web development for more than 6 years, during which time he has helped develop web solutions in use at some of the largest companies in the world. Nicholas can be reached through his web site at www.nczonline.net.

Customer Reviews

I have yet to find a better Javascript Resource
A lot of books I see maintain a single focus (Firefox or IE JS) this book does a good job of providing a large array of knowledge with proper labels as to what will and will not work with the browser your programming for (or tips to program for all of them ;) )

This i it!!!!!!
Want to really lean Javascript? this is the book for you, an indepth coverage, once you know what's under the hood, all the rest becomes a piece of cake, this what Nicholas did in this amazing book, first things first folks, this is the one you start with!!!!!

Handle with extreme care
I have enormous problems with this dated, confused and 'gappy' book, and advise would be readers to exercise _extreme_ caution with it, particularly with the examples, a great number of which are a long, long way from currently accepted best practice.

I don't believe that "Programmer to Programmer" describes this book well. The author's confusing and patchy descriptions of language fundamentals are not useful to those readers who are highly experienced in other programming languages such as C or C++. Neither does it seem that the author has clearly identified the target reader, as I imagine that the book will bewilder some beginners too. For example, for reasons unknown the author seemed to feel the need to embark on a "fundamentals of OOP" tutorial, a subject quite inappropriate for a "programmer-to-programmer" text as it should be taken as read, and one which is in any case too large to be adequately covered in a few pages. I imagine this may merely succeed in confusing novice programmers, who really do need to consult a proper introduction elsewhere. And why on earth did the author feel that a quick descent into UML was appropriate at the start of the third chapter? Another short section is devoted to explaining bit pattern operations, a subject that is arguably best left to real textbooks on programming fundamentals for beginners. At the same time, in many, many cases discussions of basic topics that experienced programmers would expect to find are simply absent. Javascript is in many ways highly unusual as a programming language, and because of the familiar syntax, C, C++ or Java programmers may be initially led to believe that its behaviour will be close to their expectations, yet this is not the case. For this reason it is crucial for a reference text to take care to tick off these crucial language-conversion issues properly.

Returning to the code examples, I have many problems with their poor quality. A sizeable number do not conform to current "unobtrusive" best practise. I can understand why this might have been done for reasons of brevity, but that doesn't excuse the poor example this sets. There is no discussion of accessibility, which is unforgiveable. And some of examples feature outdated, broken or deprecated techniques. The discussion of hacks to bolster up browser support for addEventListener, for example. Browser-sniffing, a deprecated technique features far too much, indeed a worrying number of examples rely on it. The author of this review is nowhere near competent to comment in detail on the quality of every code example, but the poor techniques clearly visible in some have the effect of casting doubt on the whole.

Despite being published in 2005, the book is simply too old to cover the recent tidal wave of high quality libraries which are now available, and which properly deal with some of the most difficult issues in basic javascript development, issues which this book simply does not acknowledge. The book deserves criticism for being yet one more contributor to the vast amount of poor quality javascript code on the web, yet of course it has to be said that any paper book will inevitable be vulnerable to the problem of obsolescence, since javascript support in browsers is so poor currently and techniques are changing rapidly right now.

This review is unapologetically harsh, yet I am not going to say "do not buy this book" outright. Although dated and harmful for beginners, there is a lot of material in this book, and for very experienced programmers in other programming languages who are forewarned about the book's unreliability it will at least give some idea of the issues and will provide a starting point for gathering a list of topics to be researched. But many readers may be simply better off consulting the blogs of the various acknowledged javascript gurus instead. Reading Brendan Eich's own articles would be a start.