I've had time lately to do a lot more reading and Jeremy Keith's DOM Scripting book is another one that belongs on your shelf if you're trying to learn any amount of JavaScript. I've hated and avoided JavaScript for years, mostly because I started my career during the browser wars and quickly grew tired of having to write different code for different browsers. Thankfully, those days are now mostly over and this book has made me love JavaScript again.

The Document Object Model (DOM) is a standard for conceptualizing and representing the contents of an HTML or XML type document. Mr. Keith's book teaches how to use JavaScript to manipulate the DOM so that you can dynamically add or remove content from a page, change the way things look, or move things around. Similar to how CSS allows you to control the presentation of your content, DOM scripting allows you to control behaviors and events.

There are lots of great JavaScript frameworks available like jQuery, Script.aculo.us, or Dojo which allow you to easily enhance your websites. In order to fully take advantage of them though, you need to have a fundamental understanding of how things like the DOM and JavaScript event handling work. That's where this book really excels. It's written primarily for web standards developers fluent in XHTML/CSS who're looking to branch into more client-side scripting.

This book is full of useful lessons and real world examples on how to make JavaScript and the DOM work in your applications. It also places a heavy focus on fundamentals and best practices such as graceful degradation which will help you make sure that your sites still function well even without the fancy JavaScript enhancements. JavaScript has long been thought to make things inaccessible but it doesn't have to be. This book stresses how to use these technologies in an efficient, unobtrusive way.

What I liked most about this book was the voice in which it was written. I've read dozens of boring hard-to-follow tech manuals over the years but this book felt more like a friend standing over your shoulder and walking you through the process. That does somewhat limit the amount of information the book can cover and it definitely doesn't go very far into advanced techniques. If you've been doing standards development and basic JavaScript for a while though, and you really want to get started on increasing your scripting skills, this book makes an excellent primer. For me it turned my impression of JavaScript from an overly-complex annoyance to an easy-to-use yet incredibly powerful tool for improving my websites.

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With a friendly and humorous style of writing, this book is liable to revolutionize the way your are writing your code, bringing you to an entirely new level of programming for the web. Although not very thick - the author doesn't miss a beat. No eccentricity of the various JavaScript functions is looked over, and when you are facing a problem - just go back to the section in the book that discusses whatever function is giving you a hard time - and you are most likely to find the reason why. Also recommended is "Css Mastery" by Andy Budd.

I really enjoyed this book. Granted, I'm a big more experienced with JavaScript than the market that this book targets, but I was looking for a sort of re-introduction to straight JavaScripting - that is, without a library like Prototype or jQuery, and this book delivers. The examples are clear and easy to follow, and the author does numerous, very practical things - all in all, a great book and an enjoyable read.

David Berube
Berube Consulting

I started reading this book with little to no Javascript experience. A little less than a year later, I'm able to take the concepts from this book and really fly. This book will definitely help you learn the foundations of the DOM (Document Object Model) and how to manipulate it to do some pretty incredible stuff. Jeremy shows you the importance of separating out your CSS, Javascript and HTML and how to make it all work seamlessly. Sure, you can do all the same stuff using Prototype, jQuery, MooTools, etc. but it's important to learn the basics first before you start using those. For those of you who know nothing about Javascript, this is the book for you. You'll really have the upper hand in making some really powerful web applications.

DOM Scripting by Jeremy Keith turned out to be just what I was looking for. It isn't AJAX. It's JavaScript, from a solid standards based model, that promotes well formed XHTML and CSS. It's good scripting build on top of good code, which is a good thing.

If the book simply promoted "best practices" it would be worthwhile. But this is a very good teaching text, too. The last feature is so rare that I bow to Mr. Keith. So often programming texts are written by and for alpha geeks and are opaque to mere mortals. I can actually understand this book the first time through.

DOM Scripting is written, not to programmers but to designers, albeit designers who are competent hand coders, but designers, none the less. The examples make sense. The projects are ones I actually will use. And terms are described in plain English, with no assumptions of some core, pre-existing knowledge. What makes this book even friendlier is that fact that it isn't a doorstop. At less than 400 pages, including appendices, it's not so intimidating that it will never get read.

If you read and work this book, you will have a solid foundation in client side, interactive web design. If you need to do AJAX, you will have a good handle on how to work its basic tools in your web pages.

If you already know JavaScript and simply want to get current on the DOM, you should find this a quick read and not a reference.

Provides a good clear, conceptual overview and reference. The philosophy/objectives of DOM are emphasisized by he author. Light on examples as the author indicates it will be.

Probably best for the beginning to intermediate developer who wants to improve their efficiency of DOM scripting. Other online and written references I tried were less complete and harder to use.

I would recommend this title. It is a little dated but still very helpful.

This book provides a couple of good example of using DOM scripting but doesn't give enough information to teach DOM CSS or Javascript. You will need additional books.

I was thinking that this was going to be another one of those books that you wish you hadn't bought until too late. But no. The authors *does* start with some very basics, but systematically brings you to a point of technical sophistication. Ultimately a valueable resource that's changed my approach to Javascript in a significant way! Think of it as "Javascript: the 'Missing Manual'". ("Advanced DOM Scripting" by a different author in this series doesn't pack half the punch of this one though. Save your money!) Bravo!

This book is excellent to help create a foundation for DOM Scripting with Javascript. The practice of unobtrusive Javascript and graceful degradation is a must. If you do not know these two terms, then this book is for you. Otherwise, this book makes a good reference, but as a developer something a little deeper may be a better choice.

This is a great book. I learned JavaScript during a time when the differences between Netscape and IE was enough to drive you away from adding any JavaScript to your page for DHTML. This book is probably best for someone already knowleadable in JavaScript and just needs to learn how to traverse the Document Object Tree to do some cool things with today's browsers. There is not sufficient material on actually learning to program using JavaScript...get another book for that. The examples are very clear and the explanations well done. I highly recommend the book.

One of the reviewers (a 1 star) complained about the lack of material on cross-platform compatibility...well the author discusses in the first Chapter "Browser Wars" how the war is over and how the book covers the most standard features that should apply to all browsers today.

This is a superb book for people who already know a whole lot about javascript and programing, definitely NOT for beginners! Before I bought this book I had worked my way through some popular titles like: "Teach Yourself Javascript in 24 hours", and then :"The Javascript Anthology, 101 tips tricks.."(600 pages only this volume!!) and I definitely needed all the bit of knowledge I had learned from them to keep up with the pace the author takes on in discussing advanced topics, in-depth! You do not only need to know the basic syntacs and the building blocks of the language like variables and loops etc,but you already MUST have an in-depth knowledge of such more advanced issues as regular expressions, types of objects, literal expressions, all the event registration modells in their complexity, bubbling-capturing included.. Should I continue listing? These do not seem to be for a complete beginner..
All in all, the above mentioned "Javascript Antology 101 .." IS a book for the false beginner- or rather for, the so-called "advanced beginner",but you need heavy armor and weaponry if you want to succeed with Advanced Dom scripting!

Learning how to AJAX your web pages may leave you floating if you don't understand the DOM well enough. This book is excellent at introducing you to what the DOM is and how to use it. Most of the other comments and the book description are great so you don't need me to write that over again. I am a professional web programmer and this book helped me move from another person who liked to do everything server side to doing even more inside the browser.

I'm not a full time programmer (was one earlier), and usually play a role in product management. So my objective was to get a grasp of the technology itself and the various components of DOM/JS. This book does that job very well. From a programmers perspective it's probably an intro level book. I have to say that the book is very well organized. I'm about to start on - Bullet Proof Ajax - by the same author.

I recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn about DOM scripting and how it fits into web development.

Dom Scripting was well written, with the beginner in mind. However, don't let the term beginner turn you off. The book gives fundamental guidelines for scripting with DOM and provides sound reasons for them. The style guidelines and their reasoning are enough of a reason to by the book.

The book proceeds from an introduction of JavaScript, to a photo gallery that is designed to work with or without JavaScript, and finally to a complete website.

This book just makes me soooo glad that I can do the same things with Flash. The more I read, the more I felt like I must have had a stroke. Just when you think you're on the edge of grasping a block of code, Mr. Keith extends the code a few more pages for testing/checking purposes, because it needs fine-tuning, etc. The material is definitely for people who think like programmers - not designers - extremely difficult to follow. I hate javascript even more now after struggling through this book. I have no idea why anyone would rather write brain-twisting code for a simple animation than create the same thing in Flash with minimal code required!

In general the DOM is grossly inconsistent across different browsers and versions. To create scripts that will be able to stand up against these inconsistencies requires an in-depth coverage of every conceivable node of the DOM tree. The author did an exceedingly poor job of describing the DOM and provided little to no information on how to compensate for the extensive browser incompatibilities. The only good thing about this book is that it makes for a great door stopper.

Very easy to follow, good explanation of the DOM. The author did a good job of using examples and building on them as new concepts were introduced. Also did a good job of encouraging little snippets of reuseable code. Although he did a pretty reasonable intro upfront to Javascript in general, it would help if a reader had some programming background (especially in object-oriented concepts). Recommended.

I was like many of you, I saw some code here or there on the internet, I browsed through W3C documents and online tutorials. This book just puts it all together in a way I thought was perfect. I gives great examples and thoroughly explains each method with out going overboard on detail. It's to the point and I would recommend this to any web developer.

Loved it, with I could find more publications written this well.

I recommend this book for people who care to write high quality javascript code. Using this book I learned new techniques for manipulating (X)HTML documents in a very powerful way.

First off, this book is not targeted to me specifically. It's evident that it is written for non-programmers who want to start building web pages with more interactivity. I, on the other hand, have a lot of experience programming with many different languages including JavaScript. The one thing I always had trouble understanding is the DOM.

Understanding the DOM is separate than knowing how to program. I believe that is the central point you should understand about this book. The book will not teach you Javascript (although it does provide some great examples). It will teach you how to think about the DOM because without this understanding, you're just blindly copying-and-pasting javascript code onto pages.

Jeremy Keith takes you step-by-step through real-world examples and in each example he shows you the conventional way to do them. Then he shows you a better way, and proceeds to explain why.

The book is a very quick read; I read it in one night. I did get to skip over some of the introductory chapters which talked a little about syntax and the differences between IFs, WHILEs, and FORs. However, I wish I had this book when it first came out almost two years ago. That's a lot of time to write plenty of bad Javascript - and I've done plenty.

This book is easily the best introductory coding book I've used. Not only does it take you from elementary javascript to some really practical applications of javascript for your websites, it also gives you a strong methodology for tackling problems you want to solve with javascript. It really touches on some good basic fundamentals of coding in general. Also, unlike some of the people pumping out web design books these days, Jeremy Keith writes clearly and explains things very logically. I hope he writes another soon!

JavaScript is like a scalpel--in the wrong hands, it can lead to disaster; in the hands of a skilled surgeon, it is a powerful tool. In Jeremy Keith's DOM Scripting, the guiding principle throughout is to turn you into that surgeon. The book opens by putting JavaScript into historical perspective, then follows that with the basics of the JavaScript language and the Document Object Model (DOM). From those basics, Keith layers and weaves best practices such as standards support, progressive enhancement, graceful degradation, and accessibility, all while slowly building components that reach a final crescendo in a complete website example. (Here's a hint: if your web pages have any in-line JavaScript code or handlers such as , you're doing things wrong.) If you're looking for in-depth Ajax material here, look elsewhere. This book is all about doing JavaScript correctly--so you won't cut yourself later.

This is one of the best computer books I have ever bought. The author teaches an invaluable method of separating content, presentation and behavior in web documents. The key benefits are graceful degradation and ease of maintenance. He ends the book with a new method called AJAX, that's used to make web pages more interactive. His teaching style is first class for people who might not like to program. He presents a problem, offers increasingly better solutions and at the end of each chapter he gives a short review. Easy reading.

Having a bit of knowledge of javascript, but not knowing exactly how to integrate DHTML without breaking the site -- this book offers a simplistic approach to convey the techniques used and recommended by accessibility professionals and the W3C.

The only drawback after having started to work with DOM Scripting on the job is that I need more complex examples.

This is a really well-written book. It figuratively takes you by the hand and walks you through DOM scripting. Highly recommended if you're looking for a good introduction to the DOM.

If you're lucky enough not to be tainted by the bad habits prevalent in today's web design, development and related programming, this is THE book you should read cover-to-cover before you write your first line of code.

For the (unlucky) rest of us, we can only hope that we'll slowly move toward what this book describes - a clean approach separating content (HTML) from design (CSS) and behavior (JavaScript).

For me this book was very helpful to understand the DOM. Everything is explained very well!! The examples are very clear to understand. I recommend this book to everybody how would like to learn Javascript and the DOM.

Do you know what JavaScript is? If not, turn around right now and get yourself a good book. I recommend "Professional JavaScript for Web Developers" by Nicholas Zakas. As a matter of fact, I would recommend buying that WITH this book.

Keith brings the reality of DOM scripting from the utopian future into the present. What is required: know your craft. That includes good XHTML, CSS, and basic JavaScript skills.

Keith's examples don't represent every conceivable possible use, but if you can grasp the concepts, you can apply Keith's excellent techniques to any situation.

This is also a fantastic pre-Ajax book, so if you see yourself going the Ajax way, you really need to get your head around DOM scripting, first.

Keith's book is at the top of my personal 'most recommended' list.

Very easy to read and learn book about DOM and JavaScript. Most exaples can be REALLY used in your own projects. It is writen very good, in not boring matter. Number 1 for siure.

Every web designer/developer picks up JavaScript at some stage, often learning by using scripts and snippets from the web. However, nothing is faster or more efficient than using your well-learnt knowledge to get the task done. JavaScript, contrary to popular thought, is a very powerful language and if used correctly (i.e. coupled with the DOM) can achieve fast and effective interfaces.

Jeremy Keith really knows his stuff and has put together an easy to understand, yet comprehensive guide to utilising the DOM through JavaScript. I found, through reading this book, that I now KNOW a lot of what I use on a daily basis, which has helped me to make much better decisions about using code and how to get the job done with less code and in a timely-fashion.

If you haven't bought this book; Shame on you! If you have, then you should be buying this for your work-mates!

This book it to JavaScript as CSS Mastery is to CSS. While not a book on JavaScript mastery in the slightest, it's really really good, and will teach you 98% of everything you need to know, relevant to JavaScript and the DOM. Just like efficient CSS design that separates the presentation layer from the design layer, it'll teach you how to separate (JavaScript) behavior from design, and how to ensure backwards compatibility through "graceful" degradation. That means your sites still work if the person disables or doesn't have JavaScript support.

Thank you Jeremy Keith. This book was worth every dollar I spent on it. I feel completely ready to start on Ajax in Action (a book I had previously set aside because of lack of knowledge about JavaScript and the DOM.)

As a experienced javascript user who got her start in the old-school javascript of IE and netscape V3 I knew the landscape had changed since the transition to ECMA script, real CSS support, and better DOM implementations across browsers.

Sometimes when you know an old method it's harder to develop the "good habits" that come with a more evolved version of the language and few resources really help with making that transition and discarding old bad habits and approaches.

DOM Scripting does just that. This approachable text is accessable for the person dabbling in javascript as well as those like me who occassionaly get into involved javascript work and developed skills and habits based on outmoded development model. It covers the concepts clearly and simply without being boring.

If you know some Javascript and want to do some nice DOM scripting this book is a great bootstrap. Another useful tool is Danny Goodman's Javascript Bible book.

It describes Javascript as used in web design and not as a separate language. Most Javascript books are like other language guides, you learn the language but have no idea what to do with it. This book is about manipulating the elements (& nodes) of a web page. It's easy to read and understand. After this you can go learn more about Javascript if you need to.

Must have it excellent book. I also recomend CSS Mastery. Great books for library.