Amazon.com (ISBN 0764531883, Paperback)

Danny Goodman has repeatedly proven himself an excellent teacher of programming languages, and this latest edition of JavaScript Bible reinforces his reputation. If you're familiar with HTML and want to endow your pages with the kind of animation and interactivity that JavaScript can provide, this book is the best one you can buy.

Goodman covers the JavaScript 1.2 language comprehensively, and focuses on developing documents that fully exploit the capabilities of Netscape Navigator 4.0x. The author begins with the fundamentals of the language--variables, loops, data structures, functions, and the like. Then, he proceeds to systematically explore the more difficult characteristics of the language, including its limited object-orientation features and the extensions that apply to Dynamic HTML (DHTML). Server-side coverage is sparse, but that technology isn't nearly as widely used as client-side JavaScript.

JavaScript Bible contains both a tutorial and a reference, so it's useful to advanced JavaScript programmers as well as to beginners. Plus, the illustrative examples included in these pages--and on the accompanying CD-ROM--are generally useful. You'll find image-rollover routines, client-side database lookups, a DHTML puzzle, and many more programs that you'll be able to quickly adapt to your own projects. JavaScript Bible is a winner. --David Wall