JavaScript for Absolute Beginners
If you are new to both JavaScript and programming, this hands-on book is for you. Rather than staring blankly at gobbledygook, you’ll explore JavaScript by entering and running hundreds of code samples in Firebug, a free JavaScript debugger. Then in the last two chapters, you’ll leave the safety of Firebug and hand-code an uber cool JavaScript application in your preferred text editor.
Written in a friendly, engaging narrative style, this innovative JavaScript tutorial covers the following essentials:
- Core JavaScript syntax, such as value types, operators, expressions, and statements provided by ECMAScript.
- Features for manipulating XHTML, CSS, and events provided by DOM.
- Object-oriented JavaScript, including prototypal and classical inheritance, deep copy, and mixins.
- Closure, lazy loading, advance conditional loading, chaining, currying, memoization, modules, callbacks, recursion, and other powerful function techniques.
- Encoding data with JSON or XML.
- Remote scripting with JSON-P or XMLHttpRequest
- Drag-and-drop, animated scrollers, skin swappers, and other cool behaviors.
- Optimizations to ensure your scripts run snappy.
- Formatting and naming conventions to prevent you from looking like a greenhorn.
- New ECMAScript 5, DOM 3, and HTML 5 features such as Object.create(), Function.prototype.bind(), strict mode, querySelector(), querySelectorAll(), and getElementsByClassName().
As you can see, due to its fresh approach, this book is by no means watered down. Therefore, over the course of your journey, you will go from JavaScript beginner to wizard, acquiring the skills recruiters desire.
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JavaScript for beginners and professionals alike,
I’m primarily an HTML and CSS developer, but increasingly I need to work with JavaScript to meet the requirements of my employer. I often use the jQuery library, which is great for performing specific tasks it is designed to do, such as making selections and simplifying animations and ajax. However, without a strong programming background, I often find it hard to keep up with my peers.
JavaScript for Absolute Beginners has changed that. I now have the vocabulary and understanding of the language that I need to communicate with my co-workers and work together on more advanced scripts. I’m now comfortable with Object Oriented Programming concepts, as well as the JavaScript syntax.
This book has too much information to absorb in a single pass. I will surely return to it in the future as I gain more experience working with the concepts I learned from my initial read. The first six chapters focus on JavaScript programming concepts and syntax. The final four chapters are a practical guide to using JavaScript to manipulate HMTL and CSS.
Despite the title “for absolute beginners”, if you’ve never worked with JavaScript before, you may want to start with Jeremy Keith’s “DOM Scripting”, or any number of jQuery (or another JavaScript library) titles. This book contains so much information, it may be intimidating to someone who is trying to get up and running with JavaScript for the first time. However, after taking those baby steps, this books should be your next read.
Furthermore, this book is not just for beginners. Anyone who wants a better understanding of programming concepts, the JavaScript language, and how to use JavaScript with HTML and CSS should surely read.
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|Spare me,
For absolute beginners this book is NOT. I would recommend JavaScript, A Beginner’s Guide for those who truly are absolute beginners. I was so lost within pages of this book, it wasn’t even funny. If you have prior coding experience, then I’m sure this book is a good way to learn JavaScript, but from a blank slate point of view, this book is way too advanced for beginners.
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