JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, Sixth Edition

Javascript the definitive guide: book cover

  • Author: David Flanagan
  • publisher: O’Reilly Media
  • pages: 1100

Summary

Novice to advanced this book will open the web as your playground, a full course on JavaScript including the new features and API’s of HTML5. It will be hard to find any topic about JavaScript which not discussed in this book.

Review

First a short introduction about me as the reviewer of this extensive Javascript book. I have worked with JavaScript for about 6 years, the last 2 years I dived more deeply into JavaScript, the main reason for this is freedom. I was mentally unrestricted in Flash and Actionscript 3, and I needed to free my mind for javascript as well.

Before this book I have read two other O’Reilly JavaScript publications; JavaScript the good parts and Javascript Patterns. Both excellent books to get a firm grasp of : structure, development and best practices of JavaScript.

For me the timing was right to dig deeper into the “framework” of JavaScript.

It immediately became clear that a lot of research has been packed into this book. The first sections explains the core features of Javascript this should get the reader quickly programming JavaScript in a right way. It is nice to see that the code examples in this section are short and self explanatory.

I read the second part with a lot of fun, this section fully prepares developers for ECMAScript 5 and HTLM 5. I learned a lot of new stuff and browser specific details. Possible pitfalls implementing new standards are clearly described. Some of the chapters I really liked were: Handling Events (17), Scripted Media and Graphics ( 21 ) and HTML5 API’s (22).

The reference is very handy, I already have used it a lot of times. It is nice to have good reference, it’s a fast, reliable and up-to-date way to look things up once familliair with the reference layout. Most times faster than a google request. With the confidence of getting clear and concise code examples.

To conclude this review I can say that this book is a must have for every “future-eager” front-end developer. This book reminds me of my worn “Essential Actionscript 3.0” book. “Essential Javascript” a.k.a Javascript the definitive guide 6th Edition can be bought O’Reilly .