A lot of books I see maintain a single focus (Firefox or IE JS) this book does a good job of providing a large array of knowledge with proper labels as to what will and will not work with the browser your programming for (or tips to program for all of them ;) )

Want to really lean Javascript? this is the book for you, an indepth coverage, once you know what's under the hood, all the rest becomes a piece of cake, this what Nicholas did in this amazing book, first things first folks, this is the one you start with!!!!!

I have enormous problems with this dated, confused and 'gappy' book, and advise would be readers to exercise _extreme_ caution with it, particularly with the examples, a great number of which are a long, long way from currently accepted best practice.

I don't believe that "Programmer to Programmer" describes this book well. The author's confusing and patchy descriptions of language fundamentals are not useful to those readers who are highly experienced in other programming languages such as C or C++. Neither does it seem that the author has clearly identified the target reader, as I imagine that the book will bewilder some beginners too. For example, for reasons unknown the author seemed to feel the need to embark on a "fundamentals of OOP" tutorial, a subject quite inappropriate for a "programmer-to-programmer" text as it should be taken as read, and one which is in any case too large to be adequately covered in a few pages. I imagine this may merely succeed in confusing novice programmers, who really do need to consult a proper introduction elsewhere. And why on earth did the author feel that a quick descent into UML was appropriate at the start of the third chapter? Another short section is devoted to explaining bit pattern operations, a subject that is arguably best left to real textbooks on programming fundamentals for beginners. At the same time, in many, many cases discussions of basic topics that experienced programmers would expect to find are simply absent. Javascript is in many ways highly unusual as a programming language, and because of the familiar syntax, C, C++ or Java programmers may be initially led to believe that its behaviour will be close to their expectations, yet this is not the case. For this reason it is crucial for a reference text to take care to tick off these crucial language-conversion issues properly.

Returning to the code examples, I have many problems with their poor quality. A sizeable number do not conform to current "unobtrusive" best practise. I can understand why this might have been done for reasons of brevity, but that doesn't excuse the poor example this sets. There is no discussion of accessibility, which is unforgiveable. And some of examples feature outdated, broken or deprecated techniques. The discussion of hacks to bolster up browser support for addEventListener, for example. Browser-sniffing, a deprecated technique features far too much, indeed a worrying number of examples rely on it. The author of this review is nowhere near competent to comment in detail on the quality of every code example, but the poor techniques clearly visible in some have the effect of casting doubt on the whole.

Despite being published in 2005, the book is simply too old to cover the recent tidal wave of high quality libraries which are now available, and which properly deal with some of the most difficult issues in basic javascript development, issues which this book simply does not acknowledge. The book deserves criticism for being yet one more contributor to the vast amount of poor quality javascript code on the web, yet of course it has to be said that any paper book will inevitable be vulnerable to the problem of obsolescence, since javascript support in browsers is so poor currently and techniques are changing rapidly right now.

This review is unapologetically harsh, yet I am not going to say "do not buy this book" outright. Although dated and harmful for beginners, there is a lot of material in this book, and for very experienced programmers in other programming languages who are forewarned about the book's unreliability it will at least give some idea of the issues and will provide a starting point for gathering a list of topics to be researched. But many readers may be simply better off consulting the blogs of the various acknowledged javascript gurus instead. Reading Brendan Eich's own articles would be a start.

This book is perfect! I have been needing a book that gives a complete study of Javascript as a programming language and this is it. Where most books discuss how to make a popup window, this book explains objects and inheritance and other concepts that take Javascript from being a basic dynamic script into a full featured one that is capable of doing practically anything you want.

The book is well written with both hypothetical and real-world examples. For each example there is a discussion about what is going to happen, the example that is notated for what is going on, and a post-example where it explains what basically happened.

If you are trying to learn on your own instead of taking a class, you may want to buy this book as it will probably meet/exceed your needs.

JavaScript has progressed from a nice little scripting language for some neat effects to a widely used programming language that is used in internal and external web applications. Not that it happened over night, but it eventually did happen and knowing and learning JavaScript is a desired skill in the web community.

This book by Nicholas Zakas goes language concepts such as ECMAScript basics, using objects, inheritance, the DOM, regular expressions and events. Basically everything you need to know about JavaScript to get a good handle on practical implementation such as form validation, browser detection, image roll-overs, sorting tables, drag and drop, error handling and XML handling, and flash embedding. This is a very complete book on almost every topic you can think of when dealing with JavaScript and current uses.

Chapter 1 - JavaScript History
Chapter 2 - ECMAScript Basics - Variables, Reference types, Operators, Statements, and Functions. ECMAScript - The core language JavaScript is based on.
Chapter 3 - Object basics - Working with objects, Creating objects, and Practical examples
Chapter 4 - Inheritance - Foundation of an object oriented language
Chapter 5 - Using JavaScript in the browser; basic JavaScript objects: window, document, location, navigator, screen
Chapter 6 - DOM basics
Chapter 7 - Regular expressions - Simple and complex patterns, understanding the RegExp object
Chapter 8 - Browser and Object detection
Chapter 9 - Events - Event flow, listeners, types of events, and cross browser events
Chapter 10 - Advanced DOM techniques
Chapter 11 - Forms and Data Integrity
Chapter 12 - Sorting tables
Chapter 13 - Drag and Drop - Learn how to simulate Ajax techniques
Chapter 14 - Error Handling - Try/Catch/Finally
Chapter 15 - XML in JavaScript - XPath, XSLT and support in browsers
Chapter 16 - Client-Server Communications - Cookies, HTTP requests, hidden frames, GET/POST differences
Chapter 17 - Web Services - SOAP, WSDL, practical examples
Chapter 18 - Interacting with Plugins - Embedding ActiveX, Flash, Applets and plugin detection
Chapter 19 - Deployment issues - Security and international concerns
Chapter 20 - Future of JavaScript

I've never seen a more complete book on JavaScript to date. If you are new to JavaScript or need a great reference or need to learn some advanced techniques (DOM, drag and drop, XML, web services) this is the book for you.