Overview
JavaScript for the World Wide Web, 4th Edition: Visual QuickStart Guide is the perfect book for those who are familiar with HTML and are ready to move up to the next level to add some pizzazz and interactivity to their Web site. Using a task-based, visual step-by-step approach and loads of useful illustrations, readers learn the basics of JavaScript: creating rollovers and frames, validating forms, working with browser windows, adding dynamic elements to your site, and more.
This revised bestseller has been expanded with five new chapters and a new appendix. New material can be found in the following chapters:
- Forms and Regular Expressions
- Handling Events
- Introducing Cascading Style Sheets
- Applied JavaScript
- Bookmarklets
- and a new appendix: Cascading Style Sheets Reference
An exciting new feature of this book is the 16-page color appendix of the JavaScript Object Flowchart and the JavaScript Object Table, all in glorious four-color detail.
Don't want to wear out your fingers by typing in all that code? Check out the supplemental Web site, where you can find all the scripts ready for you to cut and paste into your own work, as well as additional notes, addenda, and updates.
Special revised and expanded edition of this text on JavaScript for the Internet, offering a visually-oriented tutorial in JavaScript, what it can do, and how to use it. Highlights important code samples in bold color, and provides convenient thumbtabs for easy referencing. Also provides a companion Web site with additional free materials.
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
The Barnes & Noble ReviewWeb scripting is about getting the job done quickly and well. You don’t want more technical overhead than necessary. You want “news you can use” -- presented cleanly and simply, so it’s easy to use.
If you need to learn JavaScript, here’s a book that reflects the practical spirit of web scripting: JavaScript for the World Wide Web: Visual QuickStart Guide, Fifth Edition.
Updated for the latest browsers, this book takes you through all the fundamentals, from variables and events through DHTML and debugging. You’ll start with a quick overview and a little history: what JavaScript is (and isn’t); what it can (and can’t) do; where to place your scripts; how to hide scripts from ancient, stupid browsers; and how to intelligently comment them so you’ll remember what on Earth you were thinking.
Next, it’s on to basic meat-and-potatoes interactivity: alerting, prompting, and redirecting users; confirming their choices; and detecting browsers and plug-ins. You’ll then move on to what may be the world’s No. 1 use for JavaScript: rollovers.
Authors Tom Negrino and Dori Smith show how to create more effective rollovers; insert and manage multiple rollovers on the same page; trigger rollovers from links; change several links from a single rollover; and use functions to streamline your rollover code.
Building on what you’ve learned, you’ll learn how to create “cycling” ad banners, image maps, and slide shows. Want to open multiple windows? Change the contents of a window? Update one window from another? Precisely position windows on the screen? It’s all here.
The authors cover just about everything you might want to do with forms, from authentication to “select-and-go” navigation, menu selections to email address validation. There’s even a chapter on regular expressions, which let you manipulate whatever text users throw at you.
Want to add dynamic features to your page? Here’s how, starting with simple stuff (displaying the current date) and moving on to slicker techniques (working with referrer pages, writing text into documents “on the fly.”) There’s a full chapter on JavaScript event handling and another on placing, reading, and using cookies.
You’ll learn the basics of driving CSS and DHTML with JavaScript -- including detailed coverage of differences between IE Mac and Windows, Netscape 4.x and 6. Since Negrino and Smith are active members of the Web Standards Project Steering Committee, they’re well placed to advise on those maddening cross-platform/browser issues.
Next, they introduce several advanced user interface techniques (pull-down and sliding menus, tool tips, and click-anywhere form fields); then show how to minimize the amount of code you have to write and manage. Neat feature: a full chapter on “bookmarklets,” those surprisingly useful one-line scripts that nestle in your URL line and control your browser without even using web pages.
Increasingly, folks write JavaScript within their web designware. This edition adds a full chapter on using Dreamweaver, FrontPage, Fireworks, and GoLive as JavaScript editors. There’s practical debugging coverage, plus concise references to JavaScript, its objects, and the basics of CSS.
Clear writing, lean code, easy access, task-based focus: can’t beat it. Bill Camarda
Bill Camarda is a consultant, writer, and web/multimedia content developer. His 15 books include Special Edition Using Word 2000 and Upgrading & Fixing Networks for Dummies, Second Edition.