randomosity

Yes, another tutorial based guide to JavaS­cript. Does the world need another one? Do you need another one? Well, it’s made it to a second edi­tion, there must be some­thing to that. At least that was what made it worth check­ing out for me. In fact, after hav­ing spent some time with this volume, I come away very impressed. Suehring’s JavaS­cript Step by Step in a superb ‘miss­ing manual’ for novices and those already some­what acquain­ted with aspects of JavaScript.

This is a well craf­ted guide­book that has clearly adop­ted a proven pro­gres­sion. A very basic intro­duc­tion that famil­i­ar­ises someone new to JS with a couple handy devel­op­ment envir­on­ments (Visual Stu­dio and Eclipse — hey it’s a Microsoft Press book what do you expect…at least an open source altern­at­ive was sug­ges­ted), and moves to the basic gram­mar and the philo­sophy behind the lan­guage. It gradu­ally builds on your work­ing know­ledge mov­ing from syn­tax to oper­at­ors and vari­ables and then to expres­sions and con­trol mech­an­isms. The approach is in very well con­struc­ted and steps are scoped and paced for an abso­lute begin­ner, but also allow someone with mod­er­ate exper­i­ence to move quicker through the mater­ial and refresh their know­ledge. Hands-on exer­cises are sprinkled through­out and the com­pan­ion down­load­able files allow you to avoid extens­ive typ­ing and pick and choose where you really want to go hands-on. There are even spe­cific exer­cises at the end of each sec­tion for those used to a little self-evaluation. All of which means that this book will suit a vari­ety of learn­ing styles.

The steps con­tinue bey­ond the lan­guage basics to apply the build­ing blocks of JavaS­cript into the import­ant aspects of how it ties into the DOM and inter­acts with the browser — aspects that obvi­ously are very much to the raison d’etre of JavaS­cript spe­cific­ally. This builds into AJAX and Server-side integ­ra­tion, which was very much what I was most inter­ested in see­ing the hand­ling of. For someone that played around with JavaS­cript in the more dis­tant past, get­ting up to speed with how it is being used more recently (a won­der­fully sub­ject­ive ref­er­ence ;-) is a real plus and I feel that Suehring accom­plishes this well in this volume.

There are obvi­ous lim­it­a­tions to how far one can go in an intro­duct­ory (or even in a single) volume and expos­ure to the more advanced applic­a­tions of JavaS­cript (Such as AJAX and JQuery) are more lightly handled, but enough of a taste to give the novice an basic under­stand­ing and at least know where to go next and be able to be more crit­ic­ally under­stand what is needed to know to move on, i.e. when shop­ping for the next volume of instruction.

The only crit­ical issue I can raise, and it is more pref­er­en­tial than a defect, is the choice of Microsoft products largely exclus­ively, whether Visual Stu­dio or integ­ra­tion with Bing and LiveMaps. All fine products and in wide­spread use. I do tip my hat to the sug­ges­tion of other OS products such as Eclipse, but am not used to see­ing a volume aimed as par­tic­u­larly at a Microsoft-certified audi­ence. Just me I suppose.

I am actu­ally very impressed with this book and pre­ced­ing com­ment aside I think this is a par­tic­u­larly not­able volume for cov­er­ing such a wide amount of inform­a­tion, in a very well con­sidered and effect­ive level of detail. For a novice to JavaS­cript, or someone that per­haps explored it within the last dec­ade and wants to brush up on how it has been exten­ded and func­tions well with new API’s and frame­works, this is a great choice.