rfjason said
If you're a hardcore developer who shuns frameworks and frontends, this book is your bible for three reasons: cross-browser compatibility notices, completeness, and historical insight.
This book is a great touchstone for developer and freelance interviews. If the person rating to technical competence doesn't know about this book, chances are you know more about good development than your interviewer does.
The only real flaw with this book is its reduced index. The 1st and 2nd editions of this book all had thorough indexes that let you look up prototypes, elements and properties even by casual name. This 3rd edition index is stripped of those conveniences forcing you to work your brain harder to remember the proper context of that little known element you're trying to look up. Good brain exercise, perhaps. But, very annoying during crunch time. I encourage Mr. Goodman to beef the index back up for the 4th edition, which better be coming soon. (with Chrome support, yes?)
Dust Rhino said
A generally good reference book, but lacks a thorough index, and the page headings lack detail. Plan on spending lots of time flipping through the "input" and "document" pages looking for the page you want.
The book notes browser compatibility for each item, but its hard to not feel drowned in the clutter of useless "IE n/a NN n/a Moz n/a Saf n/a Op 9 DOM n/a" entries.
What I really wish I had was a "DHTML Best Practices" book where the primary useful, portable, and recommended tags/classes/events/whatever were highlighted and the deprecated/incompatible stuff was just summarized in a secondary section.
Andy Nagai said
I used to have the previous edition. I could quickly find objects and properties in the books index and just go to what I wanted. This new edition doesn't even have the event handling properties such as onmouseover and such. Its also missing some minor properties for css or html. I know the big ones, its the minor ones that i need help on. Its great that it takes into account safari, mozilla and opera compatibility, but they really did a crappy job on the index. Apparently they wanted to safe paper and removed some things from it. so, now I use the old edition and new edition. A big inconvenience.
J. Rodriguez said
The ONLY DHTML reference you need. This book has everything covered from Javascript, HTML, CSS, DOM, Ajax, Web 2.0. This is the only book that I always have by my side while developing.
Nick said
The finest review of this book I can give is simply this: I bought the first edition in 1999, the second edition in 2003, the third edition in 2007, and as long as Danny Goodman and O'Reilly keep up the good work, I'll buy the fourth edition in 2011. There is no more indispensible book available for the Web GUI professional.
One caveat: This book is not for beginners. If you don't already know how to build a modern DHTML/CSS/JS/Ajax interface, this book will likely be a waste of money. Moreover, if you're looking for how-tos and recipes, look elsewhere. This is a comprehensive encyclopedia of the DHTML universe, nothing more and nothing less.
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