Product Description

JavaScript is the brains of your Web page—it enables you to modify a document’s structure, styling, and content in response to user actions without requesting new pages from the server. Scriptin' with JavaScript and Ajax teaches you how to master this powerful and elegant language so you can develop intuitive user interactions that take the user experience to new levels of sophistication and responsiveness.

Today’s application-like Web experiences (such as Salesforce.com and Google Maps) and Web 2.0 sites (such as Flickr.com and Twitter) are powered by JavaScript and Ajax. Using the techniques shown in this book, you will be able to start creating similar experiences in the sites you design.

Scriptin' with JavaScript and Ajax will teach you how to:

• Start developing with JavaScript fast!

• Write lightweight but powerful object-oriented code

• Modify the Document Object Model

• “Progressively enhance” your pages with JavaScript to provide the highest levels of accessibility to all users

• Learn sophisticated techniques for making your pages respond to user actions

• Use the downloadable Scriptin’ library of helper functions to speed development and ensure cross-browser compatibility

• Use Ajax scripting techniques to update specific areas of the page with data from the server

• Create powerful interface interactions, such as sliding panels and tree menus

• Evaluate frameworks such as jQuery and Prototype to find the best one for your needs

• Build an online application that looks and responds like a regular desktop application

• Easily adapt the Scriptin’ code examples for use in your own projects—download them at www.scriptinwithajax.com

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #145096 in Books
• Published on: 2009-08-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 312 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780321572608
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

About the Author
Charles Wyke-Smith (Charleston, SC) has been creating web sites since 1994 and currently User Experience Architect for Benefitfocus. Charles was VP of Web Development for eStar.com, a celebrity information site, and has provided web design and consulting services to companies including Wells Fargo, ESPN Videogames, and The University of California, San Francisco. His work today focuses on site development, with an emphasis on user experience, information architecture, and interface design. Charles has taught classes in multimedia and interface design and speaks at many industry conferences.

Customer Reviews

Easy to understand - great starting point for JavaScript and Ajax
I had preordered this book after reading the author's two previous guides (Stylin' with CSS: A Designer's Guide (2nd Edition) and Codin' for the Web: A Designer's Guide to Developing Dynamic Web Sites), and this book is a great addition to the series. It gives a great overview of JavaScript and Ajax. The writing style is engaging and approachable, and the examples build on themselves in the same way that a program would be written, with more functionality added in increments, so that the end result is not only a program that works but one that the reader can understand and reuse.

Aside from being able to learn a new technology, I was able to easily justify the cost of the book by being able to use the code examples (Zebra Tables and Carousel) in my current projects. They are presented in such a way that it's easy to modify and integrate them, because you see them built from the ground up rather than just appearing as a monolithic program.

I appreciated the section on frameworks, demonstrating how to accomplish the same task with four different tools. It's a good jumping-off place for more research, and there are pointers given in the margins to useful sites and references. The accompanying website is also a great reference for examples and downloadable code.

This is not a JavaScript or Ajax reference, nor does it try to be. Rather, it guides you to a point where you can understand how to use these technologies in your own work. If you're already a JavaScript/Ajax expert, you might want something else. For me, this book met its objective of developing practical skills, and gives me a good foundation on which to build.

Some good content, brought down by loads of errors.
I'm an experienced programmer, but fairly new to JavaScript.

I liked how the book didn't get stuck on the basics and jumped quickly into real examples of applying JavaScript to enhance a website.

However, as more code appeared on the pages, so did a lot more mistakes. A number of these seemed to be the result of going through several revisions and not updating all references to the code being discussed, but many were pretty inexcusable such as:

- Glaring syntax errors
- Inconsistent names / referencing functions or objects that don't exist
- Incomplete / non-functional code in places

I was able to get something out of this book and didn't get stumped by many of these mistakes (although there were certainly some WTF moments), but I kept imagining a poor novice programmer getting totally confused by parts of the text. There were also some bad practices demonstrated in places. The number of errors is severe enough that I wouldn't recommend this book to friends or colleagues.

Very clear and concise.
I have used a previous book by Charles Wyke-Smith, Codin' for the Web, and was excited to see that he was coming out with one on Javascript/Ajax. You'll notice that his books are a lot thinner than other books aimed at beginners. He distills lessons down to essentials and manages to present concepts in ways that are more accessible to noobs.

I've done some javascript, but haven't learned it in a systematic way, and his books simplify syntax so that those of us who haven't programmed since basic or pascal back in the 80s, or perhaps those who have never programmed at all, can get our heads around these concepts.

The prose is easy to read and the examples -- unlike so many other books of this sort -- are clearly explained.
Often I've had trouble relating the examples used in programming books to projects that I am working on. Somehow Wyke-Smith explains things well enough so you can understand how to break your own projects down into the requisite parts.

This book includes discussion of jquery, and the relationships between server-side languages, web interfaces, etc.

All in all, very useful and helpful.