JavaScript: The Complete Reference, Second Edition

• #48 in Best Javascript Books

10 Reviews

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I'm not sure why there are no other reviews of the 2nd edition of this book here, but let me rectify that now. This is an extraordinarily lucid presentation of JavaScript and its related technologies. It certainly deserves the praise it received from other reviewers (see reviews of prior edition). I've only read through chapter 12, but I've learned more from this book than three prior JavaScript texts combined. From coverage of core JavaScript to a rigorous examination of JavaScript objects and the various object models, the authors have delivered exactly what I was looking for. I've always been confused about the proper interpretation of the `this' keyword. The authors explain precisely how and why that keyword operates in different contexts and I feel totally comfortable with it now. I also have to complement the authors and editors on the quality of the writing and the accuracy of the text. The writing is tight, the code samples are well crafted and self-contained and I've only found four mistakes in 400 pages of text. In fact, I've never seen so few errors in a technical book of this size. I highly recommend this book to anyone, regardless of your level of expertise.

The book is pleasantly written and easy to read, but unfortunately there are some important ommissions as far as describing the JavaScript language itself.

Inheritence is barely mentioned. There is no explanation at all of how to invoke the parent constructor with parameters.

Exceptions are not explained at all in the first part of the book, which is the language guide. Instead they are mentioned at the very end - in the applied programming examples.

There is no good explanation of the internal logic of the language - why certain things are as they are and how they fit together.

Considering the recent trend of writing full blown JavaScript applications, there is a lot to be desired.

The book is much better as a guide to applying simple JavaScript. It covers a wide variety of topics in sufficient detail - DHTML, XMLHTTPRequest, etc. The example scripts do not seem to be production quality, but they serve the purpose of illustrating the ideas well enough.

as read by Brian Buck

I found this book to be a solid reference to JavaScript. All of the examples in the book that I tried were portable and worked equally well in both Internet Explorer and Firefox. The appendices list all of the built-in objects and their associated methods and what to expect from each so building a function using the built-in objects becomes easier. One thing that I liked in particular about this book over others that I have seen is how is uses the DOM. Most books either assume you are a DOM guru and don't mention it at all or, they assume you are a DOM idiot and put so much detail about it that the book bogs down.

In 'The Complete Reference', if you want the entire breakdown of the DOM, its in the Appendices. If you don't, the book makes sure to include any references to the DOM that are pertinent to the example at hand giving enough to let the user be successful without overdoing it.

As a CIS student with some prior programming experience, I find this 948 page tome both thorough and clearly written. The double table of contents, one brief, and the other very detailed, makes it easy to find what you need. Much attention is paid to cross-browser issues. You could concievably teach yourself JavaScript with this book alone.

The text is a very good and complete explanation of JavaScript. It describes the best usage of JavaScript with the latest common browsers at the time of writing (early 2004). There are numerous examples which express the programming ideas in a simple fashion.

If you have programmed in other languages, JavaScript should be an easy learn with this book. Programs written in it tend not to be very long, as they are associated with a single web page. While JavaScript deals nicely with the various objects in a browser, like a window or document, the programs tend to have a procedural flavour.

I have found a lot of utilities and tools for building programs.

This is a fairly comprehensive book. This is not the best "beginner" book. The "beginner" info is in there - but it's mixed with so much advanced stuff that it can seem overwhelming. If you have previous experience, there's a lot of good stuff here. This is an excellent "second book."

I think the line tends to fall between the programmer types and those of us with less of a comp-sci background on this book. I stepped up to this from Jeremy Keith's DOM Scripting after a wild self-teaching binge and enjoyed reading it. It's considerably less dry than you would expect from a book of its size and I thought the author did a good job of explaining more complex JS topics. That said, some topics were starting to show their age and it's overdue for a new edition.

Overall it's a great introduction to people who want to pick up tricks across the entire gamut of JS and I found myself running into a number of objects and methods I wasn't very familiar with. When I'm looking for new JS ideas I would go to this one and start browsing sections I hadn't read as thoroughly. When I want to know exactly what is up with a given facet of JS, I go to O'Reilly's version, the Definitive Guide.

My copy was from the library unfortunately and I miss it, but I'm still holding out for a third edition as it's getting a bit long in the tooth in some sections, but this is usually obvious (like pre-ajax coverage of the XMLHTTPRequest object).

There is definitely room for both the definitive guide and this JS book on my bookshelf, however, and I personally thought it did a great job on prototypical inheritance for doing OOP-style JS.

Arrived in specified time, no issues. Use the book all the time. Pretty good reference.

The future is Javascript. Being a Microsoft technologies fanatic, I always wanted to make use of the AJAX library. My javascript needed some brusing and this was the book I went after. The complete reference, and a good companion to HTML/XHTML Complete Reference. David Flaganan's book is good too. Both deserve 5 stars.