Sams Teach Yourself JavaScript in 21 Days

Rating:
Summary: Great for beginners, too slow for experienced programmers
Review: I found this book very useful, and I was able to learn JavaScript from it, although I didn't follow the book's tutorials sequentially.

The most important thing to note is that this book is not really suitable for an experienced programmer who wants to add JavaScript to the list of programming languages that he/she knows. If you already know several other programming languages then you'll find the pace of this book much too slow. There are too many simple examples and too much discussion of basic programming principles.

For a beginning programmer these many examples and down-to-earth discussions are great. The authors assume that the reader has no knowledge of programming at all, which is fine if the reader is new to programming.

A couple of the especially useful things I found in this book were an example showing a clever way of using the onClick event for an "a" tag, and information about where to find the Microsoft script debugger.

On the other hand, I did find a few minor errors. And on page 20 a CD-ROM is mentioned, but in fact no CD-ROM accompanies the book. Instead, as explained on page 5, the sample files from the book are available on the Internet.

So if you're new to programming then this is a good book for you, but if you're an experienced programmer then you should find something else.

Rennie Petersen

Rating:
Summary: Good Book!
Review: I like the fact that its very beginner friendly. I tried reading the O'riely book and it was talking about topics I wasnt ready to cover yet and it was boring. I mean they spent a paragraph on each topic and didnt have many fully coded examples just a whole bunch of snippets without showing how it would look on screen. So I switched back to this book. It explains things for the beginner. If you are new to JavaScript this is a good book for you to get started with.

Rating:
Summary: Good But.....
Review: I thought the book was good but was a little bit too wordy. I didn't see why there needed to be so many examples on everything; but I guess that's good if you are new to programming. This book wasn't exactly what I was looking for but served its purpose. It was much better then SAMS "Teach Yourself JavaScript in 24 Hours" which had errors in it. Although I didn't care for the books wordiness it was filled with useful information and I did enjoy the chapter of SVG.

Rating:
Summary: Doorstopper. Not worth it.
Review: I thought this book was pretty good, when I first started. Because I was able to do a little something with Javascript and I've never even really tried a scripting or programming language before (I know HTML, buts thats just markup). But I put this book on the back burner after I learned what I wanted from Javascript (and really hit the wall after not being able to really use it much more after that). So I started learning Actionscript, where I saw more opportunites for its use. I got "Actionscript: The Definitive Guide" by Colin Moock, and I was actually enlightened. Everything was so much clearer. Actionscript and Javascript are very similar, and when I do write scripts with Javascript and need help, this book "Sams Teach Yourself Javascript in 21 Days" never helps me, I have to use Colin Moock's ACTIONSCRIPT BOOK and I find what I need.
The back appendix of this book, "Javascript in 21 Days", where it is supposed to list methods/functions/etc. is useless. Why even have it there? Moock's actionscript book has an appendix that you can actually use for reference (descriptions, examples, usefull)
I wish I knew all this before I bought this particular Javascript book. I suggest O'Reilly's "Javascript: The Definitive Guide", if it is half as good as Moock's "Actionscript: The Definitive Guide", you'll be all set.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent tutorial using simple language
Review: I'm in a somewhat unusual position, in that I've needed to work on some rather advanced JavaScript scripts without really learning the fundamentals. I've struggled through my projects using Danny Goldman's JavaScript Bible and many online resources, but there are holes in my knowledge that you could drive a truck through.

While Goldman's JavaScript Bible is an excellent reference book, I quickly grew frustrated when I attempted to work my way through it as a tutorial. I wanted a book that was designed as a tutorial, and used simple language to teach complicated subjects. I picked up "Teach Yourself JavaScript in 21 Days", and unlike Goldman's book, it uses simple language and a simple structure to give a clear picture of JavaScript.

I do spend well over the suggested time on each chapter, doing all of the exercises and modifying them in whatever ways I can think of. As a result, many of the things that have perplexed me for months are becoming second nature, and I'm seeing improvements in my coding abilities daily. And I'm only on chapter 4!

Perhaps my pre-existing knowledge of JavaScript is why this book seems so intuitive to me, but whatever the reason, I am excited to pick up "Teach Yourself JavaScript in 21 Days" every morning. My fundamental grasp of JavaScript has improved dramatically, and I absolutely feel this is the best tutorial book I have purchased.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent tutorial using simple language
Review: I'm in a somewhat unusual position, in that I've needed to work on some rather advanced JavaScript scripts without really learning the fundamentals. I've struggled through my projects using Danny Goldman's JavaScript Bible and many online resources, but there are holes in my knowledge that you could drive a truck through.

While Goldman's JavaScript Bible is an excellent reference book, I quickly grew frustrated when I attempted to work my way through it as a tutorial. I wanted a book that was designed as a tutorial, and used simple language to teach complicated subjects. I picked up "Teach Yourself JavaScript in 21 Days", and unlike Goldman's book, it uses simple language and a simple structure to give a clear picture of JavaScript.

I do spend well over the suggested time on each chapter, doing all of the exercises and modifying them in whatever ways I can think of. As a result, many of the things that have perplexed me for months are becoming second nature, and I'm seeing improvements in my coding abilities daily. And I'm only on chapter 4!

Perhaps my pre-existing knowledge of JavaScript is why this book seems so intuitive to me, but whatever the reason, I am excited to pick up "Teach Yourself JavaScript in 21 Days" every morning. My fundamental grasp of JavaScript has improved dramatically, and I absolutely feel this is the best tutorial book I have purchased.

Rating:
Summary: Well written book
Review: I'm very pleased with this book. It covers a large amount of JavaScript. However, like any other Sams Teach Yourself in 21 days series, this book will take you longer than 21 days to finish. The only complaint I have with this book is the lack of a JavaScript reference in the back. While it has one, it's not that large. Over all, if you want to learn JavaScript, buy this book. You can easily tell by how well written the book is that the author of this book is great JavaScript programmer.

Rating:
Summary: not for real-world projects
Review: I've read quit a lot of books on JavaScript, and this is one of the worser ones. To give just one example, the DHTML chapter. Very short, very few examples, and - even worse - only Netscape 6 and Internet Explorer 5+ are covered. Strange though that according to recent surveys Netscape 4 (which fails miserably with the examples presented) has about 7 times the number of installations than Netscape 6.
Also, chapter 21 covers SVG, which some say will make an impact, others say it won't, however there is no use to cover this very exotic topic in a "Teach Yourself" series book.
There are also a lot of other topics that are important but missing. So even if you might learn something about JavaScript, you cannot use it in real world applications. I cannot recommend buying this book :-(

Rating:
Summary: Great beginners book!
Review: This is the book that I used to teach myself Javascript.

I was able to breeze through it in 3 days, not 21 days and I would recommend the Teach Yourself series by SAMS to anyone who wants to learn a computer language.

Later when you need a big reference book, I would recommend "JavaScript: The Definitive Guide" by O'Reilly.