Marvel

I read Simply JavaScript a few months back, and couldn’t help but include it in my reviews here at withinsight.com.  Its simply too good not to.  I’ve got a decent amount of JavaScript experience, although not necessarily through practice.  JavaScript has always been that part of my web design arsenal that I’ve wanted desperately to add, but has never seemed to work its way into regular usage in my day-to-day work.  You can’t say its for lack of trying, as I’ve read the first half of O’Reilly’s JavaScript, The Definitive Guide, which while full of great info, is not necessarily the best introduction to JavaScript for the beginning scripter.  I then found DOM Scripting by Jeremy Keith, which offers a very, very introductory level explanation of JavaScript before digging into the basics of DOM Scripting.  I had a decent picture of what else was out there in terms of JavaScript books.

Jeremy Keith is actually the one who recommended Simply JavaScript on his website a while back, which is how I originally heard about it.  He stated that his book DOM Scripting was intended for a very specific audience, and that there really weren’t any other books that did it as well as he does, until Simply JavaScript was released.  Very big of an author to acknowledge the competition with a tip of the hat.

Meet Your New Friend, JavaScript

If I could, I would probably go back and start from scratch originally with Simply JavaScript.  It is a perfect introduction for the web designer looking fill out the third leg of the XHTML/CSS/JS stool that we all sit upon.  Yank and Adams present the material in a way that anyone with a little XHTML and CSS experience will not only understand, but really find themselves enjoying.  I literally found myself laughing out loud at a few points, such as:

The popularity of regular expressions has everything to do with how useful they are, and absolutely nothing to do with how easy they are to use – they’re not easy at all. In fact, to most people who encounter them for the first time, regular expressions look like something that might eventuate if you fell asleep with your face on the keyboard.

Fantastic!  There are a number of moments like this that brighten up the pages.

Simply JavaScript is written in a progressive tutorial format, so you can move through it chapter by chapter, rather than using it as a reference.  The one exception to this is the chapter on “Errors and Debugging” which falls fairly late in the book.  I was okay without it for the first few chapters, but once I got into chapters 4, 5 and 6 on events, animation, and form enhancements, respectively, I think I could have done with reading that chapter first.  In chapter 7, they introduce the Firebug Firefox extension, and how to use it to pause the state of JavaScript at selected lines in your code, which I definitely could have used a little earlier in the book while troubleshooting projects.

JavaScript Libraries Galore

Another great aspect of Simply JavaScript is how they relate the tutorials completed in each chapter to the respective current JavaScript library.  So if you’ve heard about all the cool stuff web designers and developers have been doing with libraries like Prototype & script.aculo.us, MooTools, Dojo, jQuery, or Yahoo’s YUI, but haven’t been able to find practical uses for any of them in your projects, here’s where you can make the connection.

Yank & Adams build a very nice core library that you can use to power a few solutions to design problems that have faced web designers for years, like building stripey tables on the fly, or validating form information.  They even get into more advanced topics like animation and AJAX.  Actually, after you read this book, you’ll probably realize how non-advanced these topics are.  This book truly does make JavaScript simple!

I feel like a lot of JavaScript is like a catch-22 in that until you read a book like this, you have a very limited arsenal.  You may know how to pop open a new window or change the behavior of a few links, but you don’t truly have a grasp of the potential of what you can accomplish with JavaScript.  Reading a book like Simply JavaScript, even if you don’t go into all the details and grasp every last concept, at a bare minimum lets you know what you can do, which will help you tremendously in future projects.

First Impressions Make Such an Impact

One last thing that I need to mention is the production quality of this book. Sitepoint really went all out.  I’ve got six Sitepoint books, everything from HTML basics to PHP, and Simply JavaScript is the only one that is full color. In addition to brightening up the pages with color, the footnotes are all located at the bottom of each page.  I was recently reading the O’Reilly book AJAX Design Patterns, and found it extremely annoying to have to continually skip over URLs in the middle of the text.  Sitepoint places URL footnotes where they should be, at the foot of each page, making it easier to concentrate on the text and code, and reference the footnotes when you want to.

Overall, this is absolutely the best starting point for the beginner JavaScript student, and I would recommend it to any web professional who works with code on a daily basis.  It will teach you to apply the same unobtrusive principles that you hopefully already apply of CSS to XHTML documents, instructing you how to do the same with JavaScript.

You can purchase Simply JavaScript over at Amazon.com.

Rating

• Overall: 9 out of 10