Book Reviews

DOM Scripting by Jeremy Keith is the second or third JavaScript book you should buy. No questions asked.

Jeremy Keith is one of the most knowledgeable JavaScript developers on the planet, and travels around the world teaching JavaScript at various web conferences.

This is the best JavaScript book every written (I’m not kidding). It’s a shame Jeremy did not write an introductory book as well since he is such a great writer.

Of course the subject matter is somewhat specific, but if you want to learn JavaScript, this topic is a must.

DOM Scripting: Web Design with JavaScript and the Document Object Model by Jeremy Keith is the second updated version of hie original DOM Scripting book.

It adds more unobtrusive JavaScript techniques with even better and more modern examples including animation techniques. Topics that are also covered in this new updated version are HTML5 and CSS3.

Just like his first book, it assumes some JavaScript experience but not much. Obviously, get his latest book if you dont want to get both since much is covered in this book.

Getting Good at JavaScript by Andrew Burgess is an easy to read, introductory book on getting designer-types up to speed quickly on the core fundamentals of JavaScript.

These ebooks by Rockable have been pretty good for the most part and its a cheap ($19 – ebook) and easy way to learn what you only need to know with scripting and the web.

The book is less than 150 pages but gives you a good background on the basics that most web designers will need unless they really want to do some serious programming.

JavaScript for the absolute Beginnger by Terry McNavage is an interesting book. It is for anybody who has no background in JavaScript but definitley covers things that are not in most books.

I’d still call it a ‘beginner’ book, but it teaches JavaScript from a programmers perspective so it may get complicated quickly for the non-techie person.

The author goes into teaching about object literals right away and that is great for the most modern of development practices but it can get a litle confusing. Other OOP topics such as inheritance, function as objects, chaining methods, closures, and of course DOM examples too.

Beginning JavaScript by Paul Wilton and Jeremy McPeak is one of the few beginner JavaScript books I actually like. The authors cover the basics and then some with some nice little examples in each chapter.

Wrox books are usually never pretty visually but the topics are explained nicely and the authors assume no previous programming knowledge.

This edition was published back in 2007, so there will be some references to older web browsers, but for the most part it really doesn’t matter.

My suggestion is read this book up to chapter 11 (using cookies) and then put it down and buy Jeremy Keith’s DOM Scripting book and go from there.

JavaScript Step by Step by Steve Suehring is a very basic JavaScript intro that teaches what you need to get started in JavaScript.

I know its Microsoft Press and believe me, I wouldnt put this book here unless it had some merit and it does.

Yes, it uses Visual Studio 2010 Express as its developer tool, but honestly its not a bad at all and the author does go into open source tooks like Firebug so it isn’t all bad. So if you need a basic book, its actually worth your money.

Map Scripting 101 by Adam DuVander is a nice little book on how to basics of the popular mapping frameworks such as Google Maps, Yahoo! and Bing.

Most mapping frameworks can be figured out by visiting the development site of the map framework in question but I always like a book to quickly find the basics and learn about the differences easily.

The author nicely illustrates each of the frameworks with code examples and gives a little background on mappign in general, geocoding, data formats, user locations and more.

jQuery: Novice to Ninja is one of the more newer jQuery books and has some real nice illustrations and explanations.

Although many jQuery books are kinda the same covering topics such as selecting, animating, efftects, etc., this book goes the extra mile or two and gives some further explanation on more real world examples focusing on UI controls and uses of many of them.

This book really excels in the simplistic explanations to readers that have no JavaScript experience. A real keeper for the jQuery newbies and then some.

jQuery 1.4 Animation Techniques by Dan Wellman is a great book if you want to get the most out of the animations with jQuery.

The author you already have some background in jQuery syntax but honestly the basics of jQuery is pretty easy to pickup.

All kinds of animation are covered such as slides, fades, movement, hide/show, toggle, overlays, and much more.

If you need to use jQuery this is a great book.

Test-Driven JavaScript Devloperment by Christian Johansen is a serious look at how to do autmated texting for serious JavaScript developers.

This books is geared towards enterprise-level development since most unit testing isn’t really necessary in my opinion. But the book has some really good topics on how to use functions and closures properly as well as all types of inheritance, namespacing and patterns.

So its mainly for seasoned developers who want to improve the efficiency of their coding.

Smashing jQuery by Jake Rutter is a nice overall jQuery book that covers all the bases.

It’s one of the better jQuery books on the market with good illustrations with its examples and I like the division of topics into five main sections. The author assumes no previous JavaScript expereince but of course in my opinion is always good to have a little background.

A little easier to grasp than the jQuery Novive to Ninja book and highly recommended.

High Performance JavaScript by Nicholas C. Zakas and others really goes through all the aspects of how to speed up your JavaScript coding.

It’s funny, once you create your scripts, you figure its over right? Nah, its just started when it comes to web development because apart from efficiency, compatability, re-useability, you also have to worry about performance.

Nicholas covers topics such as grouping, browser diferences, closures, DOM scripting conditions, browser threading, minification, compression and much more. A great read for overall script performance, very interesting.

JavaScript: The Definitive Guide by David Flanagan is the 6ht installment of this popular series of books and it covers almost everything that you will need to learn JavaScript as a whole.

The author assumes no previous JavaScript experience, but some of these O’Reilly books can be a little hard to grasp for some since their examples are more geared towards the programmer syntax.

So if you already have a programming background in other languages, it’s probably the best bang for the buck for most, but if your a total newbie, I’d go with another one.