Author: Jerry Bradenbaugh
ISBN:
Publisher: O'Reilly
Reviewed by: Simon Wistow
To be honest, the idea of programming entire apps in Javascript filled me with fear. Deep, pit of stomach fear. Sure I'd known somebody who written a RecDescent parser in it but they were mad. Javascript was for rollovers and that's pretty much it. Anything else is evil and wrong.
Surprisingly then, this book starts off with some good reasons write apps in the language that dare not speak its name.
The book is split into 11 chapters, 10 of which contain complete applications ranging from a Client Side Search Engine to an Interactive Slideshow, Ciphers, Context Sensitive Help and an entire Shopping Cart.
Each chapter is set up the same way - first the application features and the Javascript techniques, then the application itself and a thorough explanation of what each part is doing and then, finally, potential extensions and modifications (although doing those is left as an exercise to the reader).
The book also guides you through some of other aspects and tricks of Javascript programming such as code organisation, dealing with multiple platforms, graceful degradation and and such.
There are also three appendices - a Javascript reference, links to various resources and thirdly, and slightly bizarrely, a Perl/CGI overview (which isn't very good, to be honest).
As the title implies, this book is a Cookbook and not a reference or a tutorial however the amount of initial knowledge needed isn't great and I found it useful as a learning tool.
All in all, two thumbs up, good, clean family fun.