Pragmatic Guide to Javascript

JavaScript is everywhere. It's a key component of today's Web-a powerful, dynamic language with a rich ecosystem of professionalgrade development tools, infrastructures, frameworks, and toolkits. This book will get you up to speed quickly and painlessly with the 35 key JavaScript tasks you need to know.

The task-oriented two-page spreads get you up and running fast. The left pages explain the underlying implementation for each task, and the right pages contain code snippets for that task, along with cross-references to related tasks.

You'll learn essential JavaScript tasks in a framework-agnostic way. Learn How to manipulate the DOM and CSS, and how to use event handling and timers. You'll discover JavaScript tricks for user interface functionality: tooltips, lightboxes, image processing, infinite scrolling, and more. You'll work with forms for receiving and validating input and explore the client-server relationship with cookies, JSON, and Ajax, as well as mashups with Twitter, Flickr, and geo-related APIs. We round it off with a cheat sheet that gives you JavaScript at a glance.

Use this Pragmatic Guide to get started creating your own killer web applications, quickly and professionally.

Christophe Porteneuve has been doing IT R&D for more than 10 years, specializing early in Web development. He joined Prototype Core in 2006, wrote Prototype and script.aculo.us in 2007, and sometimes speaks at conferences such as The Ajax Experience. He's the CTO of Ciblo.net in Paris, France, where he lives with his wife, Elodie.