Once listed in the "nice to have" sections of job postings, these days the knowledge of JavaScript is a deciding factor when it comes to hiring web developers. And rightly so. Where in the past we used to have the occasional few lines of JavaScript embedded in a web page, now we have advanced libraries and extensible architectures, powering the "fat-client", AJAX-type rich internet applications.

JavaScript is the language of the browser, but it's also heavily employed in many other environments: server-side programming, desktop applications, application extensions and widgets. It's a pretty good deal: you learn one language and then code all kinds of different applications. While this book has one chapter specifically dedicated to the web browser environment including DOM, events, and AJAX tutorials, the rest is applicable to all the other environments too.

This book treats JavaScript as a serious object-oriented language, showing you how to build robust, maintainable, and powerful libraries and applications. Along the way, we cover many of the recent innovations such as AJAX, JSON, and interesting design and coding patterns. After reading this book, you'll be prepared to ace your JavaScript job interview and even impress with some bits that the interviewer maybe didn't know. You should read this book if you want to be able to take your JavaScript skills to a new level of sophistication.

What you will learn from this book?

* Learn to think in JavaScript, the language of the web browser
* The basics of object-oriented programming, and how they apply to JavaScript
* Set up and use your training environment (Firebug)
* Master data types, operators, and flow control statements
* Understand functions: usage patterns, variable scope, and built-in functions
* Closures demystified
* Create and use objects
* Understand and use prototypes
* Reuse code with common patterns for inheritance
* Understand and work with the BOM (Browser Object Model)
* The DOM (Document Object Model) - accessing, modifying, adding, and deleting nodes
* Build responsive web pages with AJAX
* JSON (JavaScript Object Notation)
* Listen and respond to browser events
* Apply design patterns to solve common problems
* Adopt coding patterns that unleash the unique power of the language
* Make your programs cleaner, faster, and compatible with other programs and libraries
* Achieve missing object-oriented features in JavaScript such as private properties and methods

Who is this book written for?

The book requires no prior knowledge of JavaScript and works from the ground up to give you a thorough grounding in this powerful language. If you do already know some JavaScript, you will find plenty of eye-openers as you discover just what the language can do.

This book takes a do-it-yourself approach when it comes to writing code, because the best way to really learn a programming language is by writing code. You are encouraged to type code into Firebug's console, see how it works and then tweak it and play around with it. There are practice questions at the end of each chapter to help review what you have learned.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 21 Ratings

Good book but doesn't deliver what the title promises - 2010-01-28
Reviewer Rating:
The book is very well written and contains a lot of great information, but if you're looking to learn how "Create scalable, reusable high-quality javascript applications and libraries", it is nearly useless. There were a total of two chapters that I found useful to a non-novice. One covered inheritance options in incredible details (which is great, since there are so many), and the last chapter gives lip service to covering common OO patterns with javascript. That's about it. "Introduction to creating objects and simple OO patterns in Javascript" would have been a much more apt title.

This book is a flop - 2010-04-21
Reviewer Rating:
I bought this book along with JavaScript: The good parts by Douglas Crockford. Whereas the Crockford book is light, easy, compact and beautiful, this book is too long, too 'for dummies', too 'cookbook' and just too wrong in its approach to the central parts of JavaScript, namely functions, objects, prototype and inheritance. In touching those concepts in 4 homonymous chapters it demonstrates silly use cases through certainly improvable so-called 'patterns', explains things in a way only to backtrack and say something along the lines of 'but wait! we were wrong!', examples are repeated three, four and more times to show the same situation, calling the same function with different parameters, filling the page with purposeless drivel and white space; everything important about JavaScript is too convoluted to make any sense because if you don't understand a language you shouldn't write about it. If this was the only book I had about JS I would hate the language, for two reasons: first, qualitative, the exposition of central concepts is poor, unsophisticated and overly complicated. Second, quantitative, the book is exceedingly verbose, for example listing every method the basic objects have, and painfully going over each with too many examples. Of course, you have handy appendices where all of it will be repeated again, once more. This information can be looked up online with less cruft on it and the book would have 200 pages less, cost less, kill less trees and give me less of a headache. The remaining chapters (7 onwards), from page 205 till 330, 38% of the book, refer to DOM and BOM and are completely off-topic in a book with this title. In two words: Misleading and expendable. To summarise: If you only read this book you will code awful JavaScript and other (good) JavaScript coders will not love you. I hope you find a better book (hint: read my first sentences again)

Greatest Programming Book I've Ever Read! - 2010-06-26
Reviewer Rating:
This is the first review I've ever written on Amazon. After reading this book and seeing how anyone could give it less than 4 stars, I felt compelled to write something. Before reading Object-Oriented JavaScript, never in my life have I read a programming book from cover to cover with such a clear understanding of everything that's going on. I finished the entire book and its examples in less than 5 days, and I absolutely HATE reading books, let alone books about programming.

The author gives amazingly clear and concise examples and explanations of the nuances of the JavaScript language that I've been waiting to understand for years. No page-long routines gone over line by line in the text following the routine, forcing you to flip back and forth to remember what the heck the autor is referring to. Almost every single example, including examples for some of the most confusing concepts to grasp about JavaScript, are gracefully done in ten lines or less almost 100% of the time.

The exercises are challenging but not impossible, and really help you understand the concepts you've just learned. It's extremely rewarding to see the light go off in your head while you crank out code that you wouldn't have been able to read yourself just a few days ago.

I always put off JavaScript and never truly understood why some people loved it so much until I started to realize that it's basically going to become the universal standard for web programming within the next 5 years or so, as more and more applications move from being primarily server driven to browser driven. The thought of having to learn JS scared the daylights out me, because I never really even remotely understood it before. It just seemed to be so different than anything else I was used to, and completely unstructured, without any kind of rules or laws governing what's going on. This book proves my thinking wrong, and it's literally the most important programming book I've ever had.

To anyone complaining that it comes short on its promise of creating "scalable, reusable high-quality JavaScript applications and libraries," you obviously misread the title. It's called "Object-Oriented Javascript" for a reason...because that's the whole goal of the book. The idea is to give you the tools to be able to create those "scalable, reusable high-quality JavaScript applications and libraries," not to create them for you.

This book is a "must-have" for any web developer interested in getting into the JS game. If you have a short attention span such as myself, and reading programming books is normally a chore or almost impossible, the concise examples and clear explanations make this book almost tailor-made for you.

Good book for beginners and novices - needs proofreading - 2010-03-28
Reviewer Rating:
Just like the title says, this is a good book about JavaScript. I like the cookbook style of books, but this style is not far behind with copious code examples and exercises at the end of each chapter. One of the most important things you can do is practice practice practice as you're learning a new programming language or technology. The only reason I give it 4 stars is because the book needs to be proofread. There are too many little mistakes here and there in the code examples, and those are unacceptable for a beginner who is trying to learn the language.

Great book for who want to learn OO Javascript - 2010-03-15
Reviewer Rating:
This is a great book for anyone who wants to start OO Javascript. It provides real examples that you can type in Firebug and see results immediately. For those who already have OO Javascript background, this book can serve as great reference.
However, it does not contain lots of advanced topics.
For those who would like to improve their code. I would recommend "JavaScript: The Good Parts" from Douglas Crockford.
Here is the list of JS books from beginner to advance.
1. Object-Oriented JavaScript: Create scalable, reusable high-quality JavaScript applications and libraries
2. JavaScript: The Good Parts
3. Pro JavaScript Design Patterns (Recipes: a Problem-Solution Ap)

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