Product Description

Part tutorial and part reference, this book not only helps you develop new JavaScript skills by building on your basic understanding of HTML, CSS, and the Web in general, but also serves as a detailed reference for the more experienced web developers among you. Furthermore, the fifth edition now includes advanced material on the latest developer topics, such as scripting Flash with JavaScript, HTTP and Ajax, DOM, SVG, XML, web services, and remote scripting. Like all O'Reilly "Definitive Guides", this book provides the most comprehensive reference section on the market, documenting every object, property, method, event handler, function and constructor used by client-side JavaScript. The new edition has also been revamped to cover the latest browsers, language updates, extensions, and JavaScript standards. No wonder, it's the top-selling JavaScript book of all time. No other book comes close.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #24830 in Books
• Published on: 2006-08-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 1018 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Since the earliest days of Internet scripting, Web developers have considered JavaScript: The Definitive Guide an essential resource. David Flanagan's approach, which combines tutorials and examples with easy-to-use syntax guides and object references, suits the typical programmer's requirements nicely. The brand-new fourth edition of Flanagan's "Rhino Book" includes coverage of JavaScript 1.5, JScript 5.5, ECMAScript 3 and the Document Object Model (DOM) Level 2 standard from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Interestingly, the author has shifted away from specifying--as he did in earlier editions--what browsers support each bit of the language. Rather than say Netscape 3.0 supports the Image object while Internet Explorer 3.0 does not, he specifies that JavaScript 1.1 and JScript 3.0 support Image. More usefully, he specifies the contents of independent standards such as ECMAScript, which encourages scripters to write applications for these standards and browser vendors to support them. As Flanagan says, JavaScript and its related subjects are very complex in their pure forms. It's impossible to keep track of the differences among half a dozen vendors' generally similar implementations. Nonetheless, a lot of examples make reference to specific browsers' capabilities.

Though he does not cover server-side APIs, Flanagan has chosen to separate coverage of core JavaScript (all the keywords, general syntax and utility objects such as Array) from coverage of client-side JavaScript, which includes objects, such as History and Event, that have to do with Web browsers and users' interactions with them. This approach makes this book useful to people using JavaScript for applications other than Web pages. By the way, the other classic JavaScript text--Danny Goodman's JavaScript Bible--isn't as current as this book, but it's still a fantastic (and perhaps somewhat more novice-friendly) guide to the JavaScript language and its capabilities. --David Wall

Topics covered: the JavaScript language (version 1.0 through version 1.5) and its relatives, JScript and ECMAScript, as well as the W3C DOM standards they're often used to manipulate. Tutorial sections show how to program in JavaScript, while reference sections summarise syntax and options while providing copious code examples.

Review
"Excellent, detailed guide." - Computer Shopper, February 2007

Salt Lake City ColdFusion User Group, March 2002
This is one of the best reference books on JavaScript you can find.

Customer Reviews

Put simply O'Reillys Javascript book is The Bible
I bought this book two years ago because I was thinking of getting into the web development business. This is one of the most useful computer related books I have ever bought and now sits on my shelf looking battered and pawed, the way a good reference book should look!

Flanagan takes the reader from basic skills to more complicated stuff like building Crossbrowser Sniffers. All of the examples in the book are of practical use and I found them useful building blocks to many of the early projects I have worked on.

The command reference is extremely thorough , and well documented. This is the only Javascript book you will ever need, and once your copy becomes battered and pawed like mine, the chances are you will have become an expert Javascript programmer.

Go buy this book!

Excellent guide / reference book for experienced programmers
I don't have enough knowledge of the subject independently of this book to rate its coverage in detail. I am a programmer experienced in other languages who had previously done some simple Javascript programming learnt "on the job". I found it a complete eye-opener as to the complexity and power of this deceptively simple language (i.e. not simple at all when you go below the surface). The book contains very useful and seemingly comprehensive reference material. It is written extremely clearly and well, to a standard that I have never before seen in computer manuals, and with lots of good examples. None of the tiresome jokeyness and dumbing-down shown by many US-written manuals! It could almost be nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature (of its kind, at least). The author has done a brilliant job. Full marks! I have not previously bought this publisher's books, but I will always look out for O'Reilly manuals from now on, in the hope that they will all come at least somewhere close to the standard of this book.

A needed update for an excellent guide
The 5th edition of the one and only bible of JavaScript, by the language guru David Flanagan, is not a surprise, but a beautiful confirmation. The 4th edition, which I've been using until a few days ago, was (and is) an invaluable reference even though it started to become a bit outdated. The new version is even more "biblic" than before, featuring nearly 1000 pages of in-depth explanation and reference. New sections include Ajax (of course, it's the cool thing of these years!), client side graphics (SVG, VML and ), JavaScript namespaces and communication with Flash and other embedded media.

The book can be divided in 2 sections: the guide - which occupies about 600 pages - and the reference which accounts for the remaining 400. Browsing the index of the book, it turns out the the parts are actually 4: for this article, I however merged the first two (the guide) and the last two (the reference).

The first section covers every JavaScript aspect, with a detailed explanation of the language and almost everything than can be achieved using it. What is being actually taught are the "roots" of all the JavaScript features: to build the complex things, you need to work on those roots (or to grab more high-level tutorials somewhere else). However, this book has everything you need, as you can figure the rest out!

The second section is the reason why every web coder will want to have this book on his desk everyday. The reference is detailed, accurate, thorough and very easy to browse. As I wrote above, it's divided in 2 parts: Core Language and Client-side JavaScript.

All in all, what can be said about this book? Even though I'm not fond of client side programming and prefer to script on the server, this is one of the few books for which I can really find nothing bad to say. It's well written, simple to understand, entertaining. There's also the Italian translation: there's the previous edition on the shelves in Italy at present time, but we'll hopefully see this new fantastic edition translated soon.