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Book Review:
JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, Fourth Edition Buy this website for $5000 USD Priced to sell, this is an established JavaScript website, growing in popularity as evidenced by its Alex ranking. Includes most website content. The price is NON-NEGOTIABLE. Serious buyers should contact
Book Title: JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, Fourth Edition I'm quite familiar with JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, Fourth Edition, by David Flanagan, because it has been an indispensable resource for me for the past six months. This is the JavaScript bible. Everything you need to know about JavaScript as well as DHTML programming is contained in this book. All the JavaScript books I had looked at prior to this book were targeted towards an unsophisticated, non-programmer audience. They haphazardly presented material and watered-down sophisticated yet important topics. Reading them felt like reading a Reader's Digest edition of a classic novel. I simply felt cheated, confused, and treated like I was some type of dummy. One of these books even went as far as to say it was for dummies in its title. Some nerve! Flanagan presents the material in the standard way that programming concepts are presented. This means, starting out by teaching the fundamentals of the language. I believe this is the only way you can learn JavaScript if you want to do more than create a rollover. What you learn from this book is that there are many subtle complexities to JavaScript. Coming to JavaScript as a snooty Java programmer I thought JavaScript was a rather silly toy of a language until I read this book. I was quite wrong. The book's language overview was exhaustive. The entire chapter devoted to using Regular Expressions in JavaScript was like drinking from a cool bubbling spring of knowledge amidst a parched and barren knowledge desert. After describing the language, Flanagan describes client-side programming with JavaScript, keeping the information cross-platform. This is followed by extensive coverage of the DOM and Internet Explorer's proprietary analogs to the DOM. The book is bit too scattered for my tastes. Topics such as methods and arrays aren't fully explained in one place, but explained progressively in several parts of the book. This approach is probably helpful to novices who are new to programming languages, yet it does make it harder to use the book as a reference. There is a detailed, well written Appendix that even has some examples. Great care went into the Appendix. It is not the typical case of lifting Spartan documentation from the party that originally created it. The Appendix contains a Core JavaScript Reference, Client-Side JavaScript Reference, W3C DOM Reference, and Class Property Method, and Event Handler Index. The general index is excellent. Flanagan is one of the best writers in the business. He is clear, concise, and thorough. It is so refreshing to see a consummate professional like Flanagan in this industry of pathetic pulp peddlers. This book is a definite winner. If you take JavaScript seriously, you must own this book. I have gotten some flack for criticizing the authors of Beginning XML 2nd Edition in this book review for voicing religious beliefs in their dedication. Flanagan has an unorthodox dedication as well, but I believe it is perfectly appropriate, especially in this day and age: "This book is dedicated to all who teach peace and resist violence." Reviewed by: Ed Phillips
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