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Designing with Javascript: Creating Dynamic Web Pages
by Nick Heinle
Paperback (CD included) - September, 1997
O'Reilly & Associates
ISBN: 1-56592-300-6
List Price: $29.95
Reviewed March 22, 1999.
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Kudos: |
- Shows how to implement popular web features
- Explains cross browser considerations
- Great production and ergonomic values
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Complaints: |
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Bottom Line*: |
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*Would you buy this book with your own, hard-earned
buckaroobies? |
They say never judge a book by its cover,
but the colorful, hyperkinetic cover of this O'Reilly book
almost induced me to give it a wide berth. And that would
have been a mistake.
In the taxonomy of textbook, cookbook, and technical reference,
"Designing with Javascript" definitely
takes the cookbook approach to Javascript programming.
Rather than go through the litany of
types and statements and object models,
it takes popular features found on websites
and asks the question: how did they do that?
This approach serves the book well for the first eight chapters,
easing the reader into all the basics:
scripting, controlling windows and frames,
working with forms, arrays, dynamic images, plug-ins, cookies, and
dealing with cross browser differences.
The reader benefits from quick solutions to practical problems such as
how not to get "framed", changing images under the mouse pointer,
user input validation, and
customization user experience through the use of cookies.
The material on browser differences is a special godsend - further
enhanced by a very helpful appendix on the features
supported by the different versions of Internet Explorer and Netscape.
The highly readable content is complemented by careful
use of color, fonts, and layout to make reading and understanding
easy.
Sample code benefits from bullets providing cross reference
into the text description.
There is an abundance of illustrations.
Sidebars provide explanations of specific details and helpful tips.
As a "how-to" styled book, "Designing with Javascript"
doesn't aim for a comprehensive discussion
of the features and functions of Javascript.
(Although there are language details in the appendices,
you will need a reference to complement it.)
Even so, some of the explanations are a bit skimpy in spots,
particularly in the later chapters.
The book rockets through dynamic HTML in a single chapter,
covering cascading style sheets, absolute positioning and animation,
and data binding, with a nod to both IE and Netcape event models
in less than 30 pages.
Maybe the book was published before there were enough
web sites pushing the DHTML envelop to provide good examples.
The author's one sample application,
deploying many features including an Active-X (now where did THAT
come from?), gets cursory coverage.
Compared with the earlier chapters, I hankered for the in-depth
treatment.
The remainder of the book runs out of steam:
the content and relevance of the previous chapters are sadly missing.
Two articles from Web Review,
on Netscape's <LAYER> tag
and a sample DHTML application,
are dropped in as chapters with little integration
with the rest of the book.
A final chapter on advanced applications is memorable only for the quote that
the Web is a "semi-organized interconnected group of documents".
Despite the weak finish, this is a useful book for the practising
Javascripter, especially the newbie or those not so technically inclined.
The "how-to" approach, with
useful tips and design ideas, gives a great jump-start.
Hopefully, in time there will be
a second edition where the DHTML chapters will be brought up
to the same high standard as the remainder of the book.
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