| My immediate reaction was that the index was skimpy and reduced the
value of this book to 5 at best on a 10 point scale. This was a little
harsh and the number of entries in the 11 page index should allow
coverage of about 2 entries per page in this 506 page manual. By way
of comparison, the index density for Inside JavaScript is 3 per page
and Python Essential Reference is 10. Let's pick up index coverage
again after assessing the book itself. |
The book consists of four parts. Part One describes JavaScript on
pages 39-147 and fulfills the promise of being a JavaScript manual.
The discussion then turns to the Document Object Model. About 10
pages later, after a section titled "The Problem with the DOM", we
abandon the DOM and now base the next hundred pages of discussion in
Part One on the jQuery third party library. Indeed, the remainder of
the exposition of the book is based on jQuery.
|
| Admirable as jQuery is, I feel this book is as much a jQuery manual as
a JavaScript manual and that should be brought out more clearly for
those expecting to learn JavaScript. Indeed, there are more index
entries under jQuery than under JavaScript. |
| Speaking of the index, is it useful for finding JavaScript information?
For loops are an essential construct and there is a 3 page discussion
on pages 94-96 but there is no "For ..." entry in the index. Date and
Time warrant 13 page discussion on 140-153 but neither Date nor time
are in the index. Several useful Regular Expressions are discussed on
pages 120-133 but Regular Expression is not in the index. |
| Ajax warrants an entire part of the book on pages 403 through 460 but
the underlying XMLHttpRequest has no entry in the index, albeit there
is an entry misclassified under (XML Extensible Markup Language). As
a positive, note that this book does cover Ajax (albeit mostly from
jQuery perspective) unlike many other earlier JavaScript books. |
| Part 4 of the book on Troubleshooting, Tips, and Tricks is an
unexpected bonus. The topic of debugging is not covered in any real
depth but that it is covered at all is a welcome addition. The list of
further materials appears to be a distillation of useful
recommendations. |
| There is companion material at the book web site which has not been
reviewed. ... and to be honest, I did not read every page in the book
once I determined that indexing issues would frustrate my being able to
use this as a reference and that most of the discussion was predicated
on jQuery |
| Who could benefit from this book? The introduction says "This book is
meant to familiarize Web designers with the ins and outs of JavaScript
and then move on to advanced tools ...". I feel the book meets the
charter it set out for itself. Additional books may be required to
program effectively but anyone who reads this book should have attained
"familiarity". The issues with the index limit how useful this book is
to come back to. After a more thorough review, I think this book would
rate 6 or 7 out of 10. |