Reviews for ppk on JavaScript (Voices That Matter)

1. Best Practical Javascript Book

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, December 12th, 2008

   This is a fantastic practical javascript book. Its not for the absolute beginner. You should have a basic understanding of Javascript before attempting this book. However once you do you will not regret it and the book lives up to its authors promise of getting you up to intermediate javascript developer level. Five stars all the way for being such a practical useful book.

2. Comprehensive, but a bit advanced for beginners

   Rated 3 out of 5 stars, May 12th, 2007

   I read this book hoping to learn a little bit of javascript for a website. It's a very comprehensive review, but for beginners it's probably too advanced to pick much up without reading from cover to cover.
   I tend to like to try out some examples and get a feel for the basic of a language first, but this book doesn't take that approach - instead, it explains a lot of theory, and then gets you doing things towards the end.
   Furthermore, the author makes reference to a set of example scripts which he wrote for various projects, but never actually gives the full scripts - instead, he looks at bits of each in every chapter. I found this very very confusing. One of the example scripts was to do dropdown menus, which was what I wanted to do, but the script was so split up over different chapters that I was unable to put it back together to try it out.
   He also gives a number of deliberately wrong examples, to demonstrate how not to do things, but again I was confused by these, especially as some of them came before the corresponding correct example - I want things I can type in and play with, and then maybe some wrong examples at the end - but ultimately, I want to know how to do it, not how to not do it!
   I think that if you read this book cover to cover, you'd probably come away as a bit of an expert, but if, like me, you like to dip in and out of computer books and try examples and get a feel for the language early on, then this is not the book for you.
   In saying that, it is very comprehensive and covers a lot of ground, so for someone who already knew some javascript, it'd be a good reference guide.