A Smarter Way to Learn JavaScript: by Mark Myers
A Smarter Way to Learn JavaScript is a good introduction to JavaScript and is full of useful knowledge. Mark Myers comes across as someone who really knows his subject and makes it easy to understand by beginners. The book could perhaps have included more reasons to learn Java compared to HTML for those completely new to it. There are a few criticisms that prevent it receiving a higher rating than 4 stars.
There are several pages at the start extolling the virtues of ebooks - does the reader really care? It doesn't have much to do with JavaScript, it just comes across as if the author is on a pet hobby-horse. Presumably the reader has already bought into the concept anyway if he's reading this as an ebook? In Chapter 2 I think it's potentially a bit confusing that the first example of a variable declaration is of a variable whose name is "name", it could lead to a misunderstanding of the syntax of the declaration statement - i.e. var name = "Mark"; could be interpreted wrongly as meaning that a variable's name is defined to be Mark. I would find it clearer to include a definition of the syntax of the statement, something like: [keyword "var"][space][name of variable][optional space][operator "="][optional space][value of variable][semi-colon] where in this case the value of the variable is the string literal "Mark". The end of Chapter 3 is missing, i.e. the bit that says if you specify a numeric literal or a variable with a numeric value in an alert statement then it gets converted to a string. Plus there are a couple of editing issues in Chapters 5 and 7.
Overall I can certainly recommend this book to a newcomer to JavaScript as being very accessible and containing much vital information.
Rating: 4 stars (WoW Blog)
A Smarter Way to Learn JavaScript is a good introduction to JavaScript and is full of useful knowledge. Mark Myers comes across as someone who really knows his subject and makes it easy to understand by beginners. The book could perhaps have included more reasons to learn Java compared to HTML for those completely new to it. There are a few criticisms that prevent it receiving a higher rating than 4 stars.
There are several pages at the start extolling the virtues of ebooks - does the reader really care? It doesn't have much to do with JavaScript, it just comes across as if the author is on a pet hobby-horse. Presumably the reader has already bought into the concept anyway if he's reading this as an ebook? In Chapter 2 I think it's potentially a bit confusing that the first example of a variable declaration is of a variable whose name is "name", it could lead to a misunderstanding of the syntax of the declaration statement - i.e. var name = "Mark"; could be interpreted wrongly as meaning that a variable's name is defined to be Mark. I would find it clearer to include a definition of the syntax of the statement, something like: [keyword "var"][space][name of variable][optional space][operator "="][optional space][value of variable][semi-colon] where in this case the value of the variable is the string literal "Mark". The end of Chapter 3 is missing, i.e. the bit that says if you specify a numeric literal or a variable with a numeric value in an alert statement then it gets converted to a string. Plus there are a couple of editing issues in Chapters 5 and 7.
Overall I can certainly recommend this book to a newcomer to JavaScript as being very accessible and containing much vital information.
Rating: 4 stars (WoW Blog)
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