Douglas Crawford, a JavaScript guru at Yahoo calls this book "the least bad of a very large class of very, very bad books". I believe him. I have not given JavaScript the respect it apparently deserves rather I Frankenstien my code together from the web page source code, web app widgets, open source libraries, and developer APIs. Thus, I have not used this book enough to rate or even review it. I am really using this review as an excuse to put a link to Dougs superb lecture online at http://video.yahoo.com/watch/111593/1... , truly entertaining.

I've bought every edition of this book. It's an excellent tutorial as well as an excellent reference. ( )

This was an excellent reference book in it's time, however as JavaScript 1.2 it is a little dated. I still use it and it is still very helpful. I would definitely recommend the updated version of this book for use. ( )

This is a great book. I give it a high recommendation. I'm an application programmer, not a systems programmer nor a software engineer. VB and SQL are just my speed and most 4GLs and scripting languages are too. I may not be a progamming genius but my attitude is 'how hard can it be?'. I will try to hack anything I can before I ask for help, but when I ask for help, I want the full complete definitive answer. That's why this book is for me. I have never coded a lick of javascript before, then one day I had to write some cookie stuff. Fine, how hard can it be? I go out onto the web and look for (and borrow) other cookie code. I find a little bit here and a little bit there. It looks very simple but ultimately none of it works for my problem. Finally I say, I'm going to have to learn this stuff. Might as well by the O'Reilly book. My attitude is that I may never have to do anything with Javascript again, but I'm also not about to waste money on a book if I'll have replace later if and when I get serious. And this book was worth it. I now have industrial strength overkill cookie code in my application plus I undertand why everything works as it does. If you have to ask, you might as well ask for it all. This book has it all. Now I can't give it 5 stars because it's outdated. There's a lot of stuff in it that doesn't apply to the latest browsers. There was nothing about Mozilla or IE 5, so that all needs to be updated. But what's there is good so you get to understand the development priorities of those browsers and what effect that has on ways you should code. All in all it's another home run for OReilly, but Flanagan needs to step up to the plate again. BTW you'll note that this book is often referenced in other good progammer's guides. "Definitive" is right.

http://www.i-reports.info/b/B199710.h... ( )