Pro JavaScript Techniques is the ultimate JavaScript book for the modern web developer. It provides everything you need to know about modern JavaScript, and shows what JavaScript can do for your web sites. This book doesnt waste any time looking at things you already know, like basic syntax and structures.

Expert web developer and author John Resig concentrates on fundamental, vital topicswhat modern JavaScripting is (and isnt), the current state of browser support, and pitfalls to be wary of. The book is organized into four sections:

• Modern JavaScript developmentusing JavaScript the object-oriented way, creating reusable code, plus testing and debugging

• DOM scriptingupdating content and styles, plus events, and effect and event libraries

• Ajaxhow Ajax works, overcoming problems, and using libraries to speed up development of Ajax applications

• The future of JavaScriptlooking at cutting edge topics like JSON, HTML 5, and more

All concepts are backed up by real-world examples and case studies, and John provides numerous reusable functions and classes to save you time in your development. There are also up-to-date reference appendixes for the DOM, events, browser support (including IE7), and frameworksso you can look up specific details quickly and easily.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 26 Ratings

Could be called "How John Resig Built jQuery" - 2009-03-10
Reviewer Rating:
In his instruction manual "Pro JavaScript Techniques", John Resig goes through a lot of great JavaScript tips and tricks, a lot of which are used in his extremely popular JavaScript framework, jQuery. That information is very durable against the eroding effects of time on technical information. If tips and tricks is what the book would have been about and would have devoted all of its pages on, it would have easily earned 5 stars from this reviewer.

However, the book also contains a LOT of dated information that isn't worth reading. This is obviously not John Resig's fault. Any technical book is going to find itself somewhat dated rather quickly. On the other hand, any review is given based on how useful the information provided is at the time it is reviewed. So the useless information dropped the book a few stars.

Given that its March 2009 (at the time of this review), this book was written in 2006, and John Resig has a new JavaScript book coming out in a few weeks (Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja), I would pass on this one and order the newer one.

Too Cute by Half - 2009-08-19
Reviewer Rating:
John Resig continually goes on about how JavaScript is not a toy language, while constantly writing code in such a way as to demonstrate that it is. Can you do powerful things with JavaScript? Absolutely. Can you demonstrate it to developers coming from non-scripting backgrounds? Not like this.

As stated in some of the other reviews, this book is not for beginners. Fair enough. I have a decent background with other languages including Java, C++, C# and PHP, and some experience with JavaScript, so I figured I could handle it. Unfortunately, that's not the case.

If you're not well versed in the screwy ways JavaScript allows you to do things, this isn't a good book for you. This book demonstrates all the hackish non-sense that many JavaScript developers use, which completely frustrates someone coming from a compiled language background. Instead of being able to focus on the core concepts the author is trying to cover, I ended up spending a great deal of time trying to sort out what the JavaScript code was doing.

I'm quite sure that there are ways to write JavaScript code which makes it understandable, and self documenting. It would have been nice if the author had chosen to write this book that way.

Your Path to JavaScript Jedi Starts Here - 2009-02-18
Reviewer Rating:
If you are ready to move beyond inline or procedural JavaScript code, then this book should be first on your reading list. Here, you'll learn how to write reusable, object-oriented, unobtrusive, namespaced JavaScript that you can package into your own libraries for distribution and deployment. In essence, properly engineered JavaScript which is scalable and extensible. Your path to JavaScript jedi starts here.

A must-read for JavaScript developers - 2009-10-04
Reviewer Rating:
If you develop applications with more than 10% JavaScript, be sure to learn to do it the proper way with John's Pro JavaScript Techniques.
Personally I bought it to properly learn JavaScript object oriented principles, but it also covers a in depth AJAX section. That last part may come in less handy because of there are so many frameworks available that take care of this but you can of course skip that part.

Only because of chapters 2 and 3, I can highly recommended this for any serious JavaScript developer comming from a server-side environment.

A step beyond other books - 2008-12-16
Reviewer Rating:
It's a really nice book, if you want to go further in JavaScript programming... for those who were sick of searching for REAL PRO techniques in JavaScript in books, like Object-Oriented Programming (topics like different ways of implementing inheritance in a prototypal language), this is a true gift for our knowledge! In other words: not one more book about how to copy and paste DHTML solutions into your site, but how to deeply understand JS and its intricate language constructions, like callbacks, closures etc. Thanks a lot, John!

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