This is the Safari online edition of the printed book.

This task-based, visual reference guide has been fully revised. It uses step-by-step instructions and plenty of screenshots to give beginning and intermediate Web designers what they need to know to learn JavaScript. Readers can start from the beginning to get a tour of the programming language, or look up specific tasks to learn just what they need to know. In this updated seventh edition, readers will find new information on Ajax design and modern coding techniques.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 14 Ratings

Great Starter Book and Reference Guide - 2009-10-15
Reviewer Rating:
Allow me to start by saying that a few years back I purchased the PHP and MySQL "Visual Quickstart Guide" by Larry Ullman, and that is what ultimately lead to this exact purchase. Second, learn JavaScript and AJAX NOW! Do not wait and come back to it. Learn it now.

The other reviewers who might give this book below a four-star rating might be looking at this book entirely wrong, however I can explain why. When you pick up this book without any previous knowledge (as it intends you are), you might be looking for something to teach you the JavaScript language and how to properly program it. You can't read a book and learn to program: you must apply yourself to practice the language and actually work through the examples that are given.

This book builds upon itself, starting with the very basic information leading to some advanced Ajax techniques. As you read through each chapter, develop the script or application it provides on your local machine or on your web server. Continually practice and read the descriptions of what each line does that the book gives.

While I do have a PHP background, I did everything in my power to keep that knowledge behind me. The JavaScript language works differently in its own ways. I went from not knowing how to even do a "Hello, world!" to being able to utilize complex Ajax functions.

Much Needed but Sloppy Editing - 2009-07-20
Reviewer Rating:
Javascript is quite hard to learn from books (well, it's a hard scripting language to learn for a number of reasons, mostly because *nobody* seems to understand the need for teaching syntax in the setting of a full script). Most books give you long, impenetrable narrative about the DOM and DOM2, the history of ECMA, deep theoretical discussions of the difference between, say, NULL and "undefined" and NaN. They are impossibly poorly suited to some guy like me, who builds webpages, has a good grasp of server-side languages, and wants to know some more solid client-side js techniques than putting a few event handlers into forms or alerting "Hello World!". These respected tomes teach little practical syntax or structure for an actual script.

This Visual QuickStart guide almost succeeds. Unlike the others, after teaching the necessary grammatical basics, it runs you through actual scripts while explaining what they do and why. It's an excellent method of teaching any programming language from a book. Larry Ullman, for instance, is a master of this writing style.

Unfortunately, the approach suffers from major defects of execution. Negrino clearly has a few philosophical postures about how javascript should be written, especially that js scripts should be written in external files in such a manner that they can be used, without modification, on any html page. This is actually okay, since it's a good approach for a more advanced programmer -- it just leaves out all other possible ways of accomplishing something and, at the worst, buries some concepts inside unnecessarily complex structures .

Much worse, the book is just poorly edited and supported. It is a nightmare to try to download the scripts from the website and, when you do, necessary graphics are missing. Even worse, the names given to the downloaded files are different from the names given to the files in the book, so you end up having to open and inspect files and scripts, and compare them to the ones in the book, to find out which one he's talking about.

In the book itself, the explanations often appear, completely unnecessarily, on a different page from the scripts. This is inexcusably lazy editing/formatting for a book this expensive. A couple of the scripts don't even work.

It's just a very frustrating book to use. It could easily have gotten five stars from me: The material is all there for a terrific text for someone who wants to learn a good chunk of practical client-side scripting syntax along with beginner-to-intermediate js theory and vocabulary. It's just very slow and frustrating, because you waste half your time on ancilliary matters.

In short, an excellent book was written, but a mediocre book was published.

Waste of time for someone wanting to learn JavaScript - 2009-05-27
Reviewer Rating:
I got this book looking forward to taking the next step and learning JavaScript, I ended up very disappointed. It starts right in with examples that include several different parts that were not explained at all, and never are explained in the whole book.

This book is very confusing and not at all for someone starting out, it almost makes one feel dumb. I looked very closely at some of the scripts trying to get them to work and they simply wouldn't. There really is no point to this book.

If you want an excellent JavaScript book then check out David McFarland's JavaScript. It is vastly better and a really great read. I have written a review on it as well.

There has got to be a better way - 2009-10-03
Reviewer Rating:
I did not care for this book. There wasn't enough general explanation and examples of the script syntax and application. The book offered very situational code that was hard to reference or modify for your own projects. I would have preferred an explanation of all the different ways a script could be applied rather than just one specific and complicated task like creating a bingo card. I was disappointed because the quickstart xhtml/css book was so well written.

Very Weak Explanations !!! - 2009-07-23
Reviewer Rating:
In the Introduction (7th Ed.), the authors write, "We don't assume that you know anything about programming or scripting." They also write, "we concentrate on showing you how to get useful tasks done with JavaScript without a lot of extraneous information."

I would revise the above-cited author quotes. 1.) If you don't know anything about programming or scripting, you will not find sufficient explanatory details for really understanding a lot of the example script code. 2.) You will be shown JavaScript code for useful tasks, but explanatory details for a lot of it will be missing, apparently because they are judged to be extraneous information, despite a declaration that the book is also for people with no programming or scripting knowledge.

I am about half-way thru the 3rd chapter, and I'm finding that the script explanations are very weak!!! If the reader wants to really understand the example script code, the reader will need to figure out much of it on his or her own (probably with the help of supplemental material, e.g. so far, I'm using JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, 3rd Ed.). Even with as little material as I have covered, it has been enough to see an established pattern of instructional presentation and quality. It has been enough to realize that the book has big deficiencies, and that something "should_be_said" about them, even at the cost of not getting other important work done.

I am new to JavaScript and AJAX, and I have an introductory background in programming fundamentals (e.g. variables; arithmetic, comparison, & logic operators; simple expressions and statements; conditional and looping structures; arrays; and functions).

I bought this book at a "brick and mortar" store, without first reading the reviews here. I strongly wish I would have delayed my in-store purchase and surveyed the reviews first. Now that I've determined the quality of this book from personal experience, I would bring to your attention some quotes from earlier reviews on this book. The quotes are cited below the dashed line. (I'm sorry I don't have another book to recommend. As I said, I'm new to Javascript and AJAX.)

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"several different parts that were not explained at all, and never are explained in the whole book."

"Incomplete Instruction - Definitely not for beginners ... In only the second chapter I started to notice several key details were being left out of the instruction."

"It doesn't explain the script it wants you to use"

"I'm having to supplement my learning from other sources in order to keep up with the book ... it's more of an intermediate level book"

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