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JavaScript for Dummies
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Author: Emily A. Vander Veer
List Price: $24.99
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 0764506331
Publisher: For Dummies (01 October, 2000)
Edition: Paperback
Sales Rank: 86,801
Average Customer Rating: 2.2 out of 5
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Customer ReviewsRating: 1 out of 5
A big disappointment
I bought this book with a basic knowledge of HTML but very little knowledge of Javascript. Being a fan of other "Dummies" books, I thought this would be a great place to start learning Javascript. Do I feel ripped off! In the Introduction, the author states the book is for those with little or no knowledge of Javascript, which I don't think at all to be the case. She claims to use "real-world examples", most of which I find to be fairly abstract and very poorly explained. She also claims that all the sample codes are contained on the CD-ROM, which is a flat out lie, the applications are similar but the coding is very different from the book, which combined with the author's hard-to-follow explanations leaves the reader very confused and frustrated. On top of all that there are several typos, one of which refering to Microsoft Windows as a word processing program, and poorly written HTML, missing several tags. The author definately knows Javascript, but how good she is as an author is questionable.
Rating: 1 out of 5
Missed it
Not to sound trite, but this book was written by Dummies.... the examples are not true to life, there are too many mistakes and the explaination of JavaScript is too complicated and overblown.
Rating: 2 out of 5
Decent reference, but definitely not for "dummies"
My general rule of the thumb is to avoid books that blatantly insult my intelligence in the title. However, I decided to give "JavaScript for Dummies" a try.The thought of teaching an object oriented programming language to a "dummie" is laughable. However, JS for Dum-Dums certainly tries, but Ms.Vander Veer needs some help in the "dummies" part. Much of what the book is based on assumes that you understand programming terms (parsing, methods, global variables, the purpose of curly braces } ).The book itself starts off good, but it just doesn't pull through. It introduces everything you'll need to write good *SIMPLE* JavaScripts. There's nothing really to say that hasn't been said in previous reviews. Despite what you may have heard, you need more than just HTML under your belt to get the full benefit from this book. Repeat, knowing HTML is not enough. Many "advanced topics" are left out in the cold, such as JavaScript's excellent implementation of regular expressions, arrays and zIndexing for dynamic effects. The explanation of Netscape and IE DOMs are shoddy at best, and the object-method reference in the back of the book needs to go back in the oven for a few more minutes. Throughout the book, you'll learn a handful of principles and see them applied through "real life" scripts. Often these examples are cute "look-what-I-can-do" scripts circa 1996. This, of course, is utterly useless. No one wants to know how to construct a poem generator in JS, save for maybe the weekend hobbyist. Ms.Vander-Veer's style of "nevermind if you don't understand / the example will reveal all" is cumbersome. Often, the example scripts are archane and overcomplicated. This will only further frustrate the newbie. Ms.Vander-Veer's literary atrocity is the case of a weekend hobbyist gone bad. Whoever told her to write a book on something she obviously has little experience in should be shot. While she explains that this is not a book for hardcore programmers (who should check out O'reilly's "JavaScript : The Definitive Guide") she does say that you will be writing professional-grade scripts by the end of the book. Only covering a handful of the avalaible objects to JScript developers only adds insult to injury. Yet, this book still has some redeeming qualities. If you've got some experience with BASIC or another relatively simple programming language, this book might be of some use as an intro. However, it is supremely insufficient as a stand-alone reference and will have you scrambling to online references frequently. In the end, "JavaScript For Dummies" is a book that chokes on it's own mediocrity, which is glaringly obvious from the hind-side perspective of a semi-seasoned JavaScript programmmer.
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