Peter Torres said
I bought this book and I love it. Much easier than surfing the internet reading blogs and snippets. No offense to [...], but that website has too much information for us newbies...
Martin Glynn said
What I appreciated most was that I could easily test myself by copying his examples and creating my own javascript.
However, I am very disappointed that a major AJAX example - which the author truncates in the book because "it'a available in the source download" is not there. Specifically, the example "Requesting Data Formatted in XML" on page 222.
This is a key example of the technology and a required feature of the book.
This type of omission occurs frequently in WROX books and I intend to document such shortcomings wherever I find them. I hope you will too!
G. Woods said
Going into this book with a basic knowledge of HTML, CSS, and Javascript, it was incredibly easy for me to follow along and pick up useful skills along the way. Paired up with the source code from wrox.com this book makes for an excellent reference.
J. Maitz said
Having read a few entry-level javascript books it was refreshing to read something that drew upon real-world situations from the authors experiences. While allot of books, and this one included, seem to have a firm grasp for the basics not many get the users/readers running quickly like this one. Mr. York represents the type of author does not waste the readers time by walking them through a problem with a firm taste of theory and discussion. He lays out the framework for anyone not experienced in javascript and points them in the direction of JQuery. And while some may complain that this book is perhaps repetitious, it is through repetition one builds proficiency and mastery of anything.
Alexander Kolesnikov said
The author's style is very clumsy, he keeps repeating the same thing again and again, sometimes as often as thrice in six lines of code. Here is an example from page 72:
"With the W3C's event model, you can assign as many of the same events to the same element that you like." [another sentence goes here] "In contrast to the traditional event model, the W3C event model lets you assign as many events of the same type to the same element as you like. In the following JavaScript, I can theoretically assign as many focus and blur events to the element as I like..."
In a number of cases, a figure is referenced in the text but does not exist in the book - try to find Figure 3-2 on the same page 72.
The same code is repeated again and again with just one small detail changed in it (although even that change isn't necessary for the example). In chapter 2, the same CSS is repeated in each example, each time taking about half a page, and the only difference is that the color of the highlight is changed for some reason from time to time. HTML code is repeated needlessly again and again, with the only difference of the name of the JavaScript file included in it. Without these repetitions, the book would be much thinner.
There are also some smaller details that I find annoying, like the author's habit to prepend many style names and element IDs with 'tmp', like 'tmpSearch'. For me, 'tmp' means temporary and when it is used for just anything in the example code, I find this misleading.
In the overall, this book is a torture to read.
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