More Jumping Javascript by Janice Winsor, Brian Freeman, and Bill Anderson Paperback (CD included) - January, 1999 Sun Microsystems Press - Prentice-Hall ISBN: 0-13-922832-2 List Price: $44.99 Reviewed March 8, 1999.
Kudos:	Lots of useful information and examples Very readable
Complaints:	Netscape only, no discussion of cross browser issues Some ugly code
Bottom Line*:	Maybe
*Would you buy this book with your own, hard-earned buckaroobies?

 

Okay, confession time. I picked up this book at a time when the I couldn't quite draw a line between Javascript and DHTML, basically because it promised latest Javascript 1.2 and 1.3 details. And note that it's called "More" Jumping Java, so don't count on it for an understanding of the basics of the Javascript language. There is actually another book in the series called "Jumping Javascript" that I bypassed. Instead, I winged it based on an intro web-publishing book and some vague knowledge of Perl - which Javascript resembles a lot.

This is a book where the multiplicity of authors really shows. The first portion of the book focuses on the various elements of DHTML, covering in good detail stylesheets, CSS (cascading style sheets), CSS-positioning, downloadable fonts, layers, and the Netscape event model, and how to get at this from either stylesheet specifications or Javascript. The section is generally strong and easy to follow, with plenty of examples neatly organized on the CD for easy manipulation. The authors go one step further through a small sample application that uses all the features that have been discussed.

The sample is a significant chunk of code that takes some patience to digest. Unfortunately, the work is made harder by some hellacious code repetition that defies everything we've ever learnt about using functions. My guess is that this has to do with the peculiarities of parameter passing for the "setTimeout" function. It would have been nice if the authors took the trouble to figure it out and then explained these ins and outs rather than leaving it to our imagination.

What about the rest of the book? This consists of a number of smaller sections covering topics such as regular expressions, object signing, global objects, the window object, etc. Each section is pretty clear and informative, but I need some help to understand why the new event model is covered again here. Although some of the subtleties of the examples can be missed at first (or second) read, these are decent reference sections. Just don't expect them to hang together as a whole.

The book talks about Javascript and DHTML according to Netscape. It makes a cursory one paragraph mention of the differences between the Netscape and Microsoft browsers. Okay, I grant you the book is published by the Sun Microsystems Press, and so it might be politically incorrect to say more about how things work differently with Internet Explorer. Still, how many of us have the luxury or audacity to author for only one system?

But okay, get over the fact this is a Netscape-only book. Another painful learning experience, which perhaps the authors could have emphasized, is that the Netscape model does not let you get your hands on and tweak all the elements within a document. You really need those appendices (thankfully provided) that show the available properties, methods, and event handlers for each object within the document object model.

So I sound like I am really down on this book, and that's not true. It does a good enough job conveying a large amount of information. It is just hard to write a good text book - instead of a "list'em out" technical reference manual. And maybe with the pace of technology change, no one has the time to do this any more. I was able to learn a lot out of using More Jumping Javascript, but it is just not the one book I would get for the topic.

---

| NSF Library Home | Retread Sam Index | Copyright |