Product Description

We know from the success of titles such as Web Standards Solutions, Cascading Style Sheets: Separating Content from Presentation, and the Web Designer's Reference that web designers are increasingly concerned with making sites that don't just look pretty, but are also built using current best practices.

There are three main technologies married together to create usable, standards-compliant web designs: XHTML for data structure, Cascading Style Sheets for styling your data, and JavaScript for adding dynamic effects and manipulating structure on the fly using the Document Object Model.

This book is about the latter of the three. DOM Scripting: Web Design with JavaScript and the Document Object Model gives you everything you need to start using JavaScript and the Document Object Model to enhance your web pages with client-side dynamic effects. Jeremy starts off by giving you a basic crash course in JavaScript and the DOM, then move on to provide you with several real world examples built up from scratch including dynamic image galleries and dynamic menus, and show you how to manipulate web page style using the CSS DOM, and create markup on the fly.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #100114 in Books
• Published on: 2005-09-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

Synopsis
We know from the success of titles such as Web Standards Solutions, Cascading Style Sheets: Separating Content from Presentation, and the Web Designer's Reference that web designers are increasingly concerned with making sites that don't just look pretty, but are also built using current best practices. There are three main technologies married together to create usable, standards-compliant web designs: XHTML for data structure, Cascading Style Sheets for styling your data, and JavaScript for adding dynamic effects and manipulating structure on the fly using the Document Object Model. This book is about the latter of the three. DOM Scripting: Web Design with JavaScript and the Document Object Model gives you everything you need to start using JavaScript and the Document Object Model to enhance your web pages with client-side dynamic effects. Jeremy starts off by giving you a basic crash course in JavaScript and the DOM, then move on to provide you with several real world examples built up from scratch including dynamic image galleries and dynamic menus, and show you how to manipulate web page style using the CSS DOM, and create markup on the fly.

Customer Reviews

great book!
really well written, clear and concise with plenty of examples.

highly recommended. i also got a "friends of ed" book on css and that was excellent as well.

cheers,
bill

Good on the whole - but far too much padding!
A good sound treatment of DOM Scripting, but one glaring error and a huge amount of wasted space - apart from a wide blank left margin used only for page numbers, the *whole* of a code sequence is repeated many times as it is built up (instead of e.g. putting the final complete code at the end of the section). The worst offender - the very useful addLoadEvent function (not his own) is repeated time after time, instead of being put into an appendix of frequently used functions. Also, on p154 of the 2005 edition there is a completely erroneous discussion of node structure when attempting to extract the value of a text node, which is only partially corrected in the online errata (the whole paragraph needs deleting urgently). Also, some very odd CSS rules are used to style his "image gallery", with list elements *twice* configured to appear horizontally vertically. Try downloading his example coding - you can delete quite a lot of the CSS without affecting the layout. But if thoroughly proof-read and corrected for a new edition, this would be a very sound introduction to JavaScript and the correct approach to DOM scripting.

Probably the best book on JavaScript - Doing it properly!
Since I started observing web standards and trying to produce websites that were accessible to the widest possible audience I've tried to avoid JavaScript assuming my sites wouldn't be accessibly to those users with screen readers or JavaScript turned off.

Jeremy Keith, from Brighton's web consultancy Clearleft, explains how to write good, clean code that degrades gracefully in this fantastic book. Starting at the beginning with the history and basics of JavaScript, he steers you comfortably through best practices and real world, useful examples. Whatever your technical ability you can soon become proficient with writing your own JavaScript and you'll soon be ready for his next book - Bulletproof Ajax