Mini-review And Competition Of Accelerated DOM Scripting with Ajax, APIs, and Libraries

Source article

JavaScript has seen a resurgence in popularity over the past few years, and with it has come an exploration of the power of the language as well as what it can do within the browser. This book will explain techniques new and old—such as closures, encapsulation, and inheritance—that many are using and how you can best apply them to your own projects.

This book is about JavaScript and using the document object model—the conduit to the HTML document. This book is not about learning how to program JavaScript from scratch. It starts with the assumption that you have done some JavaScript development before and understand the JavaScript syntax. This book builds on top of that knowledge to give you a deeper understanding of DOM Scripting and how to apply that to your projects. It uses this new understanding to describe what JavaScript libraries are and show you how they can be applied to your project. The book will also explain Ajax and how best to plan and apply it to your projects. It explains how to build simple animation objects for adding movement to elements on the page. There are straightforward examples that demonstrate the techniques used throughout the book.

Overview

By reading this book, you should have a greater understanding of how JavaScript works and be able to use advanced concepts such as closures and event delegation to build more flexible applications for the Web. You'll walk away with a greater appreciation for JavaScript libraries and how they can simplify and speed up your development. You'll also be able to implement Ajax effectively into your site, create special effects, use JavaScript libraries, and know how best to apply these libraries to your projects.

In this book, you'll learn:

Where CSS, HTML, and the DOM fit into modern scripting, and how to use them together effectively
OOP techniques for more efficient JavaScript coding
How to use JavaScript libraries such as Prototype in your work
How to build effective form validation into your applications using Ajax
How to create mashups using APIs
How to build dynamic user interfaces

Summary of Contents

CHAPTER 1 The State of JavaScript
CHAPTER 2 HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
CHAPTER 3 Object-Oriented Programming
CHAPTER 4 Libraries
CHAPTER 5 Ajax and Data Exchange
CHAPTER 6 Visual Effects
CHAPTER 7 Form Validation and JavaScript
CHAPTER 8 Case Study: FAQ Facelift
CHAPTER 9 A Dynamic Help System

Who is this book for?

This book is intended for beginners to intermediate web developers who already have a previous JavaScript and DOM scripting experience.

Competition

We've got a brand new mini-review and competition of the Accelerated DOM Scripting with Ajax, APIs, and Libraries book. The friendly people of Apress are giving away 5 books!

All you need to do, to enter the competition is, download the sample PDF and finish the following sentence:

"ActiveX is a Microsoft technology that..."

Send your answer to this e-mail address, before Tuesday the 30th of October 2007. Don't forget to include your post address and phone number (required for international shipping) in the e-mail.

Conclusion

The book is a lightweight 250 pages and is written in a pretty enjoyable and understandable way to read. The content is well-structured, set out in a successive, grading in the topic manner.

The book starts reviewing the state of JavaScript within the industry. Then it goes on focusing on methodology and technologies for rapid development with JavaScript, including OOP and events, but also Ajax frameworks and JavaScript libraries. Three complete projects for you to learn from: form validation, mashups, and UI design complete its content. All the example code in the book is built around the modern scripting principles of progressive enhancement and unobtrusive scripting, with usability and accessibility always in mind.

Overall, the book takes a positive and pragmatic view at the use of DOM scripting. It embraces and delves into the most common topics such as working with the DOM, Ajax, and visual effects.

We recommend this book for beginning or intermediate users who want to learn all about the DOM, AJAX and related technologies.