Need to learn JavaScript fast? This best-selling reference?s visual format and step-by-step, task-based instructions will have you up and running with JavaScript in no time. In this completely updated edition of our best-selling guide to JavaScript, leading Web and computing experts Tom Negrino and Dori Smith use crystal-clear instructions and friendly prose to introduce you to all of today’s JavaScript essentials. Along the way, you’ll find extensive coverage of Ajax and XML techniques, current browsers (Opera, Safari, Firefox), and more.

Visual QuickStart Guide--the quick and easy way to learn!

• Easy visual approach uses pictures to guide you through JavaScript and show you what to do.
• Concise steps and explanations get you up and running in no time.
• Page for page, the best content and value around.
• Companion Web site at www.javascriptworld.com offers sample scripts, updates, and more!

Need to learn JavaScript fast? This best-selling reference’s visual format and step-by-step, task-based instructions will have you up and running with JavaScript in no time. In this completely updated edition of our best-selling guide to JavaScript, leading Web and computing experts Tom Negrino and Dori Smith use crystal-clear instructions and friendly prose to introduce you to all of today’s JavaScript essentials. Along the way, you’ll find extensive coverage of Ajax and XML techniques, current browsers (Opera, Safari, Firefox), and more. Visual QuickStart Guide--the quick and easy way to learn! *Easy visual approach uses pictures to guide you through JavaScript and show you what to do. *Concise steps and explanations get you up and running in no time. *Page for page, the best content and value around. *Companion Web site at www.javascriptworld.com offers sample scripts, updates, and more!

Tom Negrino is the author of dozens of books includingVisual QuickStart Guides covering Macromedia Contribute and Keynote, and Visual QuickProject Guides on upgrading to Mac OS X Tiger, Keynote, and PowerPoint.

Dori Smith is the author of Java for the World Wide Web: Visual QuickStart Guide. She is a frequent speaker at industry conferences, publisher of the Wise-Women?s Web community, and a member of the Web Standards Project. Together they?ve written the best-selling Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 for Windows and Macintosh: Visual QuickStart Guide, authored numerous print and online articles, and maintain the Backup Brain weblog.

Need to learn JavaScript fast? This best-selling reference?s visual format and step-by-step, task-based instructions will have you up and running with JavaScript in no time. In this completely updated edition of our best-selling guide to JavaScript, leading Web and computing experts Tom Negrino and Dori Smith use crystal-clear instructions and friendly prose to introduce you to all of today’s JavaScript essentials. Along the way, you’ll find extensive coverage of Ajax and XML techniques, current browsers (Opera, Safari, Firefox), and more.

Visual QuickStart Guide--the quick and easy way to learn!

• Easy visual approach uses pictures to guide you through JavaScript and show you what to do.
• Concise steps and explanations get you up and running in no time.
• Page for page, the best content and value around.
• Companion Web site at www.javascriptworld.com offers sample scripts, updates, and more!

Need to learn JavaScript fast? This best-selling reference’s visual format and step-by-step, task-based instructions will have you up and running with JavaScript in no time. In this completely updated edition of our best-selling guide to JavaScript, leading Web and computing experts Tom Negrino and Dori Smith use crystal-clear instructions and friendly prose to introduce you to all of today’s JavaScript essentials. Along the way, you’ll find extensive coverage of Ajax and XML techniques, current browsers (Opera, Safari, Firefox), and more.

Visual QuickStart Guide--the quick and easy way to learn!

• Easy visual approach uses pictures to guide you through JavaScript and show you what to do.
• Concise steps and explanations get you up and running in no time.
• Page for page, the best content and value around.
• Companion Web site at www.javascriptworld.com offers sample scripts, updates, and more!

excellent book easy to read
Excellent book and easy to read. Filled with examples and references. Loved reading it.

Great Book
This book was recommended to me by a teacher, there are not many JavaScript books that describe things in an easy to understand level, this one does. It’s also helpful that the script is all available online, typing it helps to understand it, but if you type it wrong at least you can copy the online script and get it right then work out what went wrong.

A pedagogical failure
JacaScript & Ajax starts off by hastily covering the basics of programming, such as while- and for-loops in 40 pages. This pace is overwhelming for beginners but also a very peculiar combination with the authors’ style to underestimate the reader: half-way through, the book’s major concern seems to be to make sure that the reader understands that in the clause a = b; b is assigned to a. The book doesn’t go in-depth into JavaScript syntax, which can be a relief for some, but will revenge itself sooner or later.

Let me give you an example from page 310:

"function showTheHours(theHour) {
Next, set up a function called showTheHours, containing the variable theHour."

Negrino & Smith’s biggest failure, however, is the lack of the overall picture. Basically what the book provides you with is uself example code, and a translation of the code into plain English. Only that the authors seem to assume that the reader is a computer baffled only with the details, not a thinking mind struggling to make out what the code does as a whole.

In addition, the authors seem keen on urging the reader to use pop-up alerts, cryptic variable and file names and prehistoric usability solutions. What they do cover quite well however is cross-browser compatibility for major browsers.

Even with its flaws, it’s not completely useless. I learned a lot about JavaScript by wading through this, though I’m convinced there’s a book that would have been more helpful and less painful.

Should be called: JavaScript (& a chapter on AJAX)
This is my first QSG book. I assume the layout is "feature" of the series, if so this will be my last.

Bottom line first: the title is a lie, this is a book about javascript with a chapter on AJAX; this book has good content, but the presentation will drive you insane while you read it.

Layout:
The book has a good concept but doesn’t execute it well. Each page is divided into two columns, the example code is in one column, the text describing that code is in the other. This really is a great concept. It’s used in analytic copies of a number of Shakespeare’s plays and works well there. It works because they are conscientious about pagination, include line references, and use facing pages not columns.
Columns are a problem because each line has about three words before wrapping. The dot syntax of javascript is particularly hard to read with such short lines.
The pagination / line reference is really the biggest problem in the QSG’s execution. They let the text and code flow through the columns across pages without much attention. This means you are constantly flipping forwards and backwards to see the code as you read. Without line references the flipping is not just annoying it’s really more of a search.
They make two attempts to address the pagination problem: first, the code being talked about is highlighted in red; second, they reprint the code block being talked about in the text column. Neither of these is helpful. Half of the code ends up being highlighted red - at most you can scan the red blocks to figure out what that code is an example of, and what is just there to support the example. If they are going to reprint the code anyway why not just go over to a normal layout? My suggestion: use facing pages for the next edition!

AJAX:
This is not a book on AJAX. This is an introduction to javascript that includes a buzz word in its title to jump off the shelf at people. It’s not even an introduction to javascript from an AJAX prospective. In fact AJAX isn’t covered well in the book. For example there is very little discussion of how to navigate returned XML using javascript. AJAX is mentioned in the intro and then ’taught’ in chapters 15 and 16. (Chapter 16 is just a discussion of available libraries!) You can’t give AJAX top billing and then devote 10% of the actual book to it.

So why 2 stars?

I was looking for a book that assumed very little or no knowledge of javascript. I was hoping for something that would address canonical javascripting, best practices, and a bit theory behind the topics being covered. I’m self taught and wanted to see how things should be done instead of how they can be done. This book would be a darn good intro for a beginner. The theory and best practices parts were not explicitly addressed as often as I would have liked; however, they were demonstrated and covered at times.

4 star content, less 1 for layout, less 1 for title.

JavaScript & AJAX
The book arrived quickly. I is new quality. I intend to increase my knowledge of DOM, JavaScrip anf AJAX.

Interesting collection of examples, not good for learning
I’ve been learning JavaScript off and on, with some success, for three months. In doing so, I’ve skimmed about a half-dozen books and tried the following three, so far, "graded" below:

Learning JavaScript (Powers B-)
VQS JavaScript and Ajax (Negrino & Smith C+)
O’Reilly JavaScript Pocket Reference (Flanagan B)

It’s hard to find good books on this because the subject matter is new and the books are often dashed off quickly. VQS JavaScript and Ajax is essentially a collection of well-explained examples of well-organized code. It’s written more to fill pages than flesh out the subject, however. The explanations are unnecessarily wordy and the broader coverage of concepts, context and how to, you would want to include in a teaching book are missing.

Strangest of all perhaps is the author’s choice of leaving out how html talks to Javascript or the details of how they link. Since JavaScript’s purpose is to interact with html and pass things back and forth, it’s sort of like doing marriage counseling and only focusing on what the woman’s thinking to herself. Unfortunately, they’re not the only authors that make this oversight.

The VQS format is great and they do a good job of using color to highlight the portions of code they’re referring to. The is a good, annotated collection of code examples. It’s something I’ve found to be only marginally helpful in getting started.

All Examples - Not too Much Explanation
I’m an experienced procedural php, xhtml and css developer with litter foundational knowledge about javascript. I purchased this book to fill that gap and was a little disappointed. It’s not a bad book but it assumes a lot and has little instructional flow. The book scrolls though one example after another without much explanation for the actual language constructs behind javascript.

The author states that this book is not for beginners and I don’t consider myself to be one, however, I’d advise anyone looking to buy this book to have a solid understanding of object oriented programming principals before they do so.

Overall it’s not a bad book for a certain audience but it lacks foundational, and in my opinion vital, information about javascript.

Not the best learning tool
This book gives some nice examples of usable code for a few common uses but doesnt give a very good explanation of what is being done and why. if you have great programming experience and a excellent knowledge of the DOM this book would be good way to get some javascript going, but for the average person looking to learn how javascript works and apply it in other ways than those shown in the book you are better off elsewhere.

Not for Dummies (ie me)
Ok, let me put it this way. If you don’t understand what "concatenated" means or "string" (in the computing sense) or are iffy on whether or not you know what a "boolean" is, this book is not for you. I simply could not follow this book, as it briskly takes you through one example after another without really taking the time to stop and explain concepts. I can see how this format can be helpful for people who have at least some programming experience and don’t need a whole paragraph devoted to the word "concatenate," but for dodos like me, this book is too hard. There are books out there that really take the whole process apart and explain underlying concepts in depth, and I’d recommend one of those over this for most people.

Easy to Understand
This book is really clear and easy to understand. Other programming books have left me with questions. Not this one! I am very satisfied with the purchase.

Disappointing
Maybe it is because I do not come from a object-oriented background, but I found this book left me confused. Unlike the other books from the series (Castro: HTML and Ullman: PHP) which I have found excellent introductions, I am still confused how to really get the best out of Javascript.

Great help for beginner javascript programmers
This book is great for beginner programmers who have little experience in javascript or any other scripting language. Out of the several books and resources I have read, this was by far the easiest to follow and work my way through. It takes a practical approach and shows you how to get things done.

Lacking in clear explanation
I’ve used other books in this series for PHP, MySQL, XHTML, and CSS. They’ve been on the whole very clear. It came as some disappointment then that this book was quite a lot more obscure. To be fair to the authors, they do say in the introduction that they ’won’t delve too deeply into the syntax’. If you’re the sort of person who runs a mile from syntax, you may be happy to naively type in their scripts without asking why something is structured in a particular way or what terms like *this* mean. I spent the first chunk of chapters trying to deduce the syntactic considerations for myself from examples, but it’s not easy. The syntax is essential to really understanding what’s going on and to taking your own next steps. My guess is that more readers can’t on the basis of this input. For myself, I can see me graduating pretty quickly to the Essential Javascript book from O’Reilly in order to make sense of what’s going on.
Overall, I think the authors’ approach doesn’t work. Sadly, it’s made worse by the rather irritating habit that some American educational authors have of adopting a jokey -- but not particularly funny -- tone. Why do they do that?
I’ve enjoyed the Visual Quickstart series up until now, but I will think twice next time before assuming they’re all up to the same standard.

Decent
This reference is good for beating in the Javascript basics. It is also a fairly decent introductory read to AJAX. Beginners, only.

Required reading
Without dumbing anything down, this book introduces those familiar with HTML and CSS to the next step in webcoding: JavaScript programming, and the next step beyond that: Ajax. Being a web developer who’s not very left-brained JavaScript and Ajax for the Web is helping me step-by-step to get more into the programming mode, enhancing the pages I run in the process. Required reading for the subject(s) it covers. (Unlike what others have said, I didn’t have any problem with the pagination. Maybe I’m just used to it now from having read several other PeachPit VQP books.)

Really helpful for complete beginners
I read this book having no knowledge of Javascript or Ajax to start with, and found it very clear, helpful and comprehensive. There are lots of examples, and the authors take the reader through things step by step. Towards the end there are sections for specific actions, such as creating rollover buttons and drop down menus, and if you want to you can just type in the scripts to get your page to work.
You would need a basic understanding of HTML and CSS and so on to fully understand this book; they do take you through those in sidebars, but I’d say this mightn’t be enough if you really knew nothing about either - the authors themselves say that they expect readers to have some familiarity with basic HTML and CSS.
The book is accompanied by a website which allows you to download the scripts, gives examples, and gives access to downloads of chapters which appeared in earlier editions but have now been removed.
If you’ve never done any programming before, the book is a good starting point for that; things are introduced slowly and with lots of explanation.
The style is casual and chatty, and the book is enjoyable to read.
It’s probably not enough for advanced javascript, but that’s not the aim and there are plenty of other books which give more advanced techniques and which would be useful as follow-ons from this one.

Just Another Reference
I guess I’m spoiled after reading the Visual QuickStart guides by Larry Ullman on PHP and MySQL. In those you actually learn how to use the software by building or programming projects. That’s the way you learn any skill -- by doing. Along the way, you also learn many valuable insights into why you’re doing what you’re doing. (It’s also a lot of blood, sweat, tears, and frustration -- all an important part of learning!)

JavaScript and Ajax doesn’t live up to that expectation. It’s just another reference book, like countless other reference books on these subjects. If you like the style with lots of screenshots and don’t already have a reference book on the subject, it might be worth buying. As one reviewer said, however, screenshots of code that reproduce what’s already in the text just take up space that could be used for additional information. (They’re very useful when you’re actually building projects as a part of your learning.) Also, it’s not as well organized and indexed as other reference books, such as those by Wrox.

Just keep in mind that you won’t learn to do JavaScript and Ajax in this book. You only learn skills by doing. Instead, you will read about them. That’s a very different thing.

A great book for beginners
This is a great book for beginners, i.e. developers who have little or no JavaScript knowledge. QuickStart books always have hands-on examples which is useful as it lets you see how stuff works straight-away without getting too bogged down in code.

I read through the book quickly (as I’m comfortable with PHP and already know a bit of JavaScript) but it gave me a good solid base knowledge & when I started writing my own little scripts, I had the book on my side as reference to iron out my beginner mistakes.

One element which was missing was information about accessibility and graceful degradation, so I’d recommend that once you’ve finished reading the QuickStart book you get yourself a book by [...] to understand how to use Ajax without making a site inaccessible (e.g. javascript turned off).

But even with this info missing this is a really useful beginner’s guide to JavaScript & Ajax. It’s hands-on, covers all the important bits & pieces and gives enough examples so that beginners can see how scripts work in action. Buy this book together with a book by [...] and your JavaScript library is sorted!

Though Obviously High Quality, Hard Book for Beginners
I did the VQS PHP book, found it to be very well put together, easy to understand, and useful to be quickly up and running. This book is not so. Perhaps it’s because JavaScript is more complicated. I’m on Chapter 3, and am having a really tough time getting through these scripts. They’re very complicated, though obviously well thought out. Really, I’m just typing away to see what the scripts will look like when implemented. But I look over the example and can only vaguely understand how it’s put together.

What’s interesting is the authors write in the beginning that you can download all the code for the book, so you don’t have to type it. Forgive me if I’m a little naive, but isn’t that the point of VQS? Typing it out so you learn it? Kind of like writing in cursive makes you remember how to write in cursive? If it’s not the point of the series, then why wouldn’t I just get the O’Reilly stuff and have my head crammed full of facts and intermediate concepts, instead of something that claims to get you up and running right away?

Often times the authors write "we’ll go into more detail on this later," but they move so quick that I don’t know how I’ll ever get to any later chapters. If you don’t get a concept right away, you’re in trouble, because they start implementing the concepts in the next example as if they are innate. For instance "getElementById" is used so many times, but only explained briefly at the beginning...I’m confused about syntax, but there’s very little on understanding the syntax.

It’s apparent that this couple can really program well, with tight code. What I’m not so sure of is that they understand what it is to be a "beginner." Many of the concepts they use are certainly vital, but without a teacher, I’m really at a loss to understand them.

I’d love to recommend this book more highly, but that would mean that I’m smarter than I am. As a newbie to programming and JavaScript, I’m having a tough time with this.

JavaScript/Ajax book review
Although I bought the book for class, and would normally sell it once class is over, this book was extremely helpful and will definitely be a book to keep for my personal library. It was what title said, and helped me understand the course material better. I am not a perfect student, I am not 100% in any class, but because of this book, I still learned more then I would’ve attending course alone.

Great starter JavaScript book
This is the sixth editing of the Visual QuickStart Guide to this book and it is the best so far. It finally focuses on some of the WSC standard DOM practices that all the other new JavaScript books have been showing the past year. It also has some a great chapter on one of the most popular JavaScript library/toolkits: Yahoo! UI. This library by Yahoo! has tons of ways to help you create quickly a JavaScript and/or Ajax widget/application for your own site.

This book is a great beginner book for people trying to get into coding or programming since all you need is a web browser and no fancy compiler or other costly program. The book goes though the basics of JavaScript with creating variables and where to put your scripts. The author shows you some simple examples to get you started. It then focuses on more language basics such as loops, if statements, creating custom functions, and arrays. It gives a simple examples for each topic and then builds a small application with each new topic covered to show the reader how they all can be put together. I really like how the author does this because it shows the reader what can be done with JavaScript instead of just explaining each topic and moving on.

The book then covers manipulating images with JavaScript since doing image-rollovers is what got JavaScript noticed years ago. Then the bigger chapters focus on handling forms which the other big use of JavaScript for years. Being able to manipulate data in forms as well as validate that data is crucial for understanding some of the power of JavaScript. The book also has a good section in Chapter 8, with forms and regular expressions. Using regular expressions can be very tricky but he book gives some good examples on how to use them with some of the built-in JavaScript objects (string) to validate specific patterns of form data (ie. email address).

Towards the end of the book (chapter 9 and 10), the author covers basic event handling (onload, onmouseover, onmouseout, onfocus, onblur, onkeypress, etc) and creating and editing cookies. These two topics have been around for years in JavaScript, but are an important topic(s) if you want to learn additional JavaScript topics.

The rest of the book covers most of the new additions for this 6th version: DOM, JSON (JavaScript Object Notation), Ajax, Ajax toolkits (Yahoo! UI), Bookmarlets (small scripts stored in browser favorites - IE7 may not work because of updated security). Each topic is covered in enough detail to give the reader a good basics understanding of some of the more advanced topics that are used today.

After this book, you can progress to more JavaScript books focusing on DOM or JavaScript Libraries or Ajax.

This is a great first book on JavaScript for someone new to programming or coding. Whether you’re a graphic designer or just a internet newbie wanted to get started.

Excellent practical introduction.
The audience for this book is beginning/novice web developers with a knowledge of HTML but not of JavaScript. The book begins with an introduction to basic JavaScript language features and then proceeds to work through a number of examples according to category (images, frames, browser windows, forms, regular expressions and strings, user events, and cookies). After, there are two chapters on AJAX fundamentals.

The book does not claim to be an in-depth resource. The general purpose of the QuickStart series of books is to provide an overview of the main concepts and practices in use by web developers today. It is meant to be a STARTING POINT to introduce novices to technologies, not as an in-depth reference. The authors of this and other QuickStart books point this out continually, yet still get bad reviews from people who have not taken the time to read about the purposes of various series from technical publishers. This is unfortunate for the public as well as unfair to the authors.

A previous reviewer mentioned what he took to be atrocious coverage of Ajax. The book contains two chapters exclusively covering Ajax. The first covers the fundamental techniques used to take advantage of this combination of technologies. The second chapter explores some of the popular Ajax toolkits currently available. This is consistent with the purpose of the book. Some readers may be interested in heading down the development path, yet others may be more interested in design and in using pre-existing tools. This book caters to both and has no intention of deceiving either reader.

The following quote is a good example of this. It is an excerpt from the title page of Chapter 16, which follows the introductory chapter (basic XMLHttpRequest usage, etc.) and precedes the Ajax toolkit chapter:

"[Writing] Ajax applications can be difficult. They often require a great deal of knowledge of working with the DOM, CSS, JavaScript, and server resources. Since this is a book for beginning scripters, we’ve shown you how to do some easy things with Ajax, so you can see that learning Ajax techniques is well within your reach. But many books have been written that are completely devoted to showing intermediate-to-advanced scripters how to create Ajax applications, and our Ajax chapters are no substitute for that kind of in-depth exploration."

As for the dual-column formatting that some reviewers disliked, it is consistent with the formatting of the entire QuickStart series, as well as the QuickPro series of the same publisher. The format is nice for tackling specific techniques in a concise amount of space. It is not as abstractly engaging as conventional technical books, but it is not meant to be. The format is excellent for explaining techniques (especial design techniques) as well as for conveying a sense of quick forward momentum.

I’ve only recently started reading books from Peachpit Press, and I will turn to them before I turn anywhere else. I am a web developer who has been doing light programming for the last several years. I like these books because they get me up to speed quickly, and act as a comprehensive starting point, allowing me to understand "where I need to go from here."

This book is excellent as a broad introduction with lots of real-world examples. If you’re a novice web developer with a decent grasp of HTML wishing for a comprehensive introduction to JavaScript and practical JavaScript techniques, this is the book for you.

However, if you’re well-grounded and are looking for more in-depth coverage of JavaScript and Ajax techniques, "Professional JavaScript for Web Developers" (Nicholas Zakas / Wrox Press) and "Professional Ajax" (Zakas, et. al. / Wrox Press) are excellent in-depth resources geared toward real-world professional development, and both are among the best peer-reviewed titles in existence on these subjects.

not very useful
I bought this book and returned it two days later. As another reviewer has noted, the page layout is annoying and hinders readability. My main complaint is that the book shows how to do some stuff with javascript but lacks any explanation of why it was done that way. There isn’t enough information in the book to be able to expand the book’s examples into something you would want to use in your website.

When I took this book back, I bought the new Learning Javascript. I have only read the first chapter so far, but I have learned more useful information from it than I did from the Visual Quickstart Javascript book.

It lives up to the VQP series perfectly
While this is not the book to use if you’ve never even attempted programming, if you have at least moderate experience, Dori and Tom’s latest revision will get you moving in the JS/Ajax world quite quickly. As a sysadmin running everything but AS/400s at the moment, I am more than a little appreciative that they tested out the book’s code on as many browsers and platforms as they did.

It’s not the Ultimate Tome Of Javascript Knowledge, but it’s not supposed to be. Nor is it going to tell you how to do everything. But what it will do, and by design, is get you pointed in the right direction , and give you the basic skills and knowledge you need to get down to business quickly.

I will agree that some of the pagination is suboptimal, but that’s Peachpit’s problem, and at least to me, didn’t detract, and doesn’t detract from the book’s ability to get me from 0 to 60 in a short amount of time.

Not a good layout or good content.
The layout of this book is very annoying. The first column has screenshots and the second column has the actual text. This makes code very difficult to understand because code that should fit on one line turns into three lines. This book does not do a good job at explaining Javascript either. It just gives examples and shows you what they do. The Ajax section is a joke, it only has about 50 pages on it and most of that tells you to use other peoples programs instead of how to write your own. I am still waiting to find a good AJAX book. Hopefully O’Reilly will come out with a Safari Series book soon, I am always satisfied with their books.