Rating: 
Summary: There has to be a better way...
Review: I am a huge fan of the Visual Quickstart series. They do a wonderful job teaching the basics, whether it be PhotoShop or HTML. Generally, they also provide more than enough information to progress to more in-depth training on a particular subject matter. I can not, however, recommend Javascript for the World Wide Web. I found this book confusing at best, lacking in substance, and poorly ordered with no logical progession in the lessons. This book is great provided all you want is some code to copy onto your page...the codes do work, but it falls short when it comes to providing a basic understanding of the language, it's syntax, and underlying principles. I had much more luck with web-based tutorials. I can not tell you where to look for a good beginning Javascript manual, but I can say that this book isn't it.
Rating: 
Summary: Perfect JavaScript Book for a Newbie Web Site Designer
Review: If, like me, you already know a little basic HTML but you're still pretty new to designing web sites, then this book will be perfect for you. I decided to try it because I'd had good experiences with two other books from the Visual QuickStart series published by Peachpit Press. This one also proved to be a winner - easy to understand and fun to use. In just a very short time, I learned enough to make by web pages much more interactive and exciting. The sample scripts are great. I've downloaded and customized half a dozen of them. Just the section on "More Effective Rollovers" would be worth the entire price of the book, but I've also learned a lot about working with frames, controlling the size and position of new windows, creating pull-down menus, validating information obtained by forms, and using DHTML to create special effects. I only started learning HTML and publishing web pages about two years ago. Before that, my computer skills consisted of nothing more than being able to use a word processing application and a spreadsheet program - that was all - I had no programming experience. As a web page author, I'm entirely self-taught and not a techie, so if I can use this book to good advantage, then almost anyone can! I recently got my first paying job as a web site designer, largely on the strength of some pages which I had "jazzed up" with JavaScripting from this book. I heartily recommend it! (The other two excellent books from this same series are "HTML for the World Wide Web, 4th Edition" and "Perl and CGI for the World Wide Web, 2nd Edition," both by Elizabeth Castro. I recommend them also!)
Rating: 
Summary: Dictated but Not Read
Review: More hack dictation to the computer... I doubt that they typed even a word of this book. I can't believe that publishers still give these two money! Scripts don't work... poor descriptions. Go to O'Reilly for a real book on Java. This doesn't deserve a star... unless you are on Survivor Island and need paper to start a fire.
Rating:
Summary: Helpful Javascript Book
Review: If you want clear, concise explanations and examples of Javascript, this is the book. I looked at dozens of books at the bookstore and this is the one that I finally chose to spend my money on. The main feature that I found helpful was the use of red type in the script examples to highlight the topic being covered. That makes the differences in the code jump out. Other Javascript books stick to black-and-white text where you have to hunt through both the html and script text to see what's being described. I also found this book's concise, example oriented approach to be more appropriate to my programming needs since I just want a brief explanation of the function with an example or two. What I don't need is another 500 page compendium of Javascript taking up space on my bookshelf. This Javascript Visual Start Guide is a nicely manageable 290 pages of useful and well-indexed information.
Rating:
Summary: This book gives me an UNDERSTANDING of what I'm doing!
Review: I've browsed through several "how to" books on JavaScript and found most of them full of detail. Wonderful, but for a relative "newbie", it can be overwhelming at times. This book makes the learning curve short and makes programming fun. In the past, I tried to figure out how they did that - looking at the source code. I'd paste in some code and spend hours trying to figure out why it didn't work. I've been to many JavaScript sites and picked up scripts here and there, but I needed a single source to speak to me in plain English. I bought this book mainly as a primer - assuming I'd have to buy one of those huge ones later. This one has surprised me in that it seems to cover more than I want to know, and it seems to make the learning process easy. At this point, I've tried most of the simple scripts and I'm getting into the more complicated ones. I'm still understanding what I'm doing, and that helps me get the results I'm looking for. Well laid out and seems to have the reader in mind - Keeps true to the title of the book - good diagrams, and aimed at someone who wants to get STARTED in JavaScript. An excellent book!
Rating: 
Summary: SCRIPTS DON'T WORK
Review: It seems to me that most of these scripts don't work. I'm in IT and also a web site administrator, and I still can't get them to work as they are written. I give the authors a 3 for being motivated enough to write the book, though. It seems that they have good intentions.
Rating:
Summary: Great introduction
Review: I maintain content for a corporate extranet. I have often implemented JavaScript scripts and made some modifications. However, I had never really understood how the scripts worked. I got this book and "Beginning JavaScript" by Paul Wilton, so I could learn the nuts and bolts. After reading this I started to actually understand the scripts I was implementing. I recommend that beginners start by reading the Visual Quickstart (VQ) book and then move onto something more indepth like Wilton's book. VQ is an excellent concise introduction to the basics of JavaScript. It gives a quick explanation of things such as event handlers, methods, properties, functions and loops. You should be able to finish this book in a couple of weeks and have a solid understanding of the basics of JavaScript. However, you will then need something more indepth to truly learn to program complex JavaScripts.
Rating: 
Summary: A good book to add but should not be your only book
Review: I have two other Javascript books and have used on-line resources from time to time. I found this fifth edition to be a worthy addition. It isn't intended to be the ultimate comprehensive book, nor does it target the advanced scripter who wants the latest in tips and tricks. As it says in the introduction, the authors "concentrate on showing you how to get useful tasks done with JavaScript without a lot of extraneous information." The "Where to Learn More" section directs you to an excellent sampling of on-line resources that more than adequately addresses what you might find lacking in this book. There are lots of practical examples and there is a companion site on-line where you can check out the examples and access the code for copy and pasting. Since there are so many different ways to do things with JavaScript, you may or may not like the choices the authors make in the examples but you can't go far wrong imitating their style. The language is clear and easy for me to understand, which really helps. Javascript can be really frustrating compared to some other languages because there is zero tolerance for error and the error messages generated are of such little help in identifying the problem. The tips this book offers on debugging are worth way more than the price of the book!
Rating:
Summary: Good for copying code you need but not learning JavaScript
Review: I have to agree with Robert from Philly above -- this book is good for copying code that you need for your site but NOT for teaching you how to use JavaScript, despite the fact that the front cover claims that you can "teach yourself JavaScript the quick and easy way!... You'll be up and running in no time!" Well, you cannot teach yourself JavaScript with any depth of understanding with this book and the only way you can be "up and running" is by copying their code into your HTML document. Right at the beginning of the text there is a brief section (5 pages) describing what objects, properties, methods, event handlers, and variables/values are, but then the text jumps right into complex code for specific functions with general explanations of the details and barely any explanation of the syntax, as if the authors just EXPECT that you will want to copy the code for your own personal use instead of understand it. I was very, very disappointed in this book that was recommended to me by a JavaScript teacher.
Rating:
Summary: Blast From the Past
Review: JavaScript for the World Wide Web does not offer anything extraordinary in regards to the JavaScript (ECMAScript) language. This book focuses on simple web tricks that are simply out of season for modern web design and programming. There is hardly, if at all, coverage of programming with modern browsers like IE6, Opera 7, and Mozilla and with web standards from W3C, nor is there mention of non-web programming usages of JavaScript (ECMAScript) like for .NET, Acrobat, Flash. So if you want to do little web tricks that was popular with Netscape 3 and Netscape 4 from almost a decade ago (frames, forms, images, etc.), then this book is for you. If you want to program for modern applications including modern web browsers, then you'll have to look elsewhere as this book is a waste of time, even it was for free.
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