JavaScript Objects

Rating:
Summary: What a Remarkable Discovery
Review: I had hoped to learn how to jazz up my Domino Web-pages from a JavaScript book. When I got it home, I found something completely different inside.

This is a book about how to implement serious data handling with a serious object oriented programming language.

The authors cover all the basic JavaScript language and browser connections in the first 75 pages. They leave out a lot of glitzy tricks that you really need, but you can get those off any web-based tutorial after you really understand the language.

Once they leave the basics, they cover genuine oo programming in a serious and educational way. They explain what they are doing, and they explain *WHY* brilliantly. It is an excellently written book and a lot of fun to read.

If you are hoping to create a snazzy web-site without much work, you will find this book frustrating. If you want to understand JavaScript to the bone, and learn how to extend it as far as the eye can see, you WILL be able to outdo all the snazzy web-sites when you are done.

The book is incredible.

Rating:
Summary: Waste of my Money
Review: I have worked with javascript for some time and wanted to learn to create javascript objects and impliment them into my code. I thought that this would be the perfect book for my needs but I have never been so wrong. The book could be called "creating data structures using javascript" because it jumps right into complex examples of creating data structures with very little explanation of what is happing from a language prospective. I did get far enouph to write some BAD object code and post it out to a news group who got me on the right track. THIS IS NOT THE BOOK FOR YOU IF YOU ARE TRYING TO LEARN JAVASCRIPT OBJECTS FOR THE FIRST TIME. It is now in my trash basket.

Rating:
Summary: Thinking clearly in a scripting language
Review: Your code can benefit from object-oriented programming even if your language doesn't support it directly. Javascript provides more support for O-O programming than (say) C, although much less than Java.

JSO shows you how to write client-side applications in object-oriented Javascript. It leads you through useful examples using the technique, demonstrating that you can do many sophisticated and useful things with this 'scripting' language.

For very experienced programmers, this will at times be a slow, but most developers will benefit from the close attention to the code.

JSO doubles as a concise introduction and reference to Javascript, covering it better in 80 pages than those bricks in the bookstore do in 1200.

The strength of this book is also its weakness. Since it focusses on client-side functionality, its example of client/server Web programming is unrealistically tilted towards providing all functionality on the client. But, given the current state of the art, I can't think of a better way of doing this without spending too much time on server-side issues. Along the same lines, the current incompatibilities among implementations force it to be browser-specific (Internet Explorer).

Overall, this is probably the best book on client-side Javascript programming -- as long as you don't care about cross-browser compatibility.