Javascript Guide

JavaScript, the Definitive Guide, David Flanagan, O'Reilly, 1998, 776 pages.

First, let me apologize for using such an "old" book, and there may be newer versions out by now. But if so, I will certainly not be buying them to find out if they are better.

This purports to be a definitive guide, and I have come to expect O'Reilly books to be of high quality. Unfortunately, this one is almost worthless to me.

The author spends a lot of time and verbage trying to explain how JavaScript works, and how to go about doing the various specific things one might want to do in JavaScript. Unfortunately, the explanations are lacking in sufficient clarity to achieve their purpose, and even more unfortunately, the book just does not contain sufficiently illustrative code examples to truly walk one through the steps necessary to learn the language.

It is the lack of enough high quality code samples that is the chief problem of the book. The code samples tend to be very short , a line or two or three, where longer examples would have been more to the point. The author could have saved himself, and the reader, a lot of words and time by using more and better, succinct code samples.

'nuff said. $40 wasted.