Javascript Book

The Book of Javascript by Thau!, No Starch Press, 2000, 397 pages + CD-ROM.

Normally, I tend to shy away from relatively short, hip, cool books about computer programming. But in this case, this, quick and easy book happens to suit my purposes perfectly.

The book is light and easy, and it doesn't go into too much detail, which usually means the book is not too useful. Au contraire. This book just happened to hit all the subjects I wanted for a quick and dirty book on using JavaScript. In doing so, it gave me much more practical, useful information than did O'Reilly's "Javascript, the Definitive Guide", which is a much bigger and more serious book.

The "Book of Javascript" was written by a very smart fellow, who happens to also be hip and cool, which is a nice combination. He does not even pretend to give a detailed summary introduction to the JavaScript programming language. This is not a reference book nor is it a complete introductory book. But it is well written and easy to understand, and on the topics it does cover, it gives enough code examples to actually guide me through doing what I want to do.

The topics covered include most of the basics. Most importantly for me, the book does an excellent job of describing the techniques used to create simple user interaction forms for data input and output.

A fun and useful book, worth every bit of its $30 price. If you just want to get up to speed on basic JavaScript for use on your own web site, as quickly and painlessly as possible, this is the book for you.