a pre-review review
working my way through DOM Scripting.
I’m on Chapter 6, and I’ve realized that one of the things I appreciate about this book is his use of pseudo-code: “In plain English, this is what I’m going to do:” and so on.
JavaScript is admittedly one of my personal challenges, but I’ve already had several aha! moments, and I think I might actually know what I’m doing by the time I finish.
Which book?
D’oh! I never mentioned the name of the book…it’s Jeremy Keith’s DOM Scripting, which continues fabulous.
I had a feeling that might be the book. I thought it was excellent, particularly for people like us who’ve dismissed Javascript in the past as mainly useful for making bologna dance.
Exactly. Funny thing today: I was raving about it to my assistant, who nodded and said “I know” — turns out he went out and bought a copy himself and is working through it as well. Had much the same reaction, too.
(I wrote my first script from (mostly) scratch today!)
I particularly like his recasting of AJAX as Hijaax, where you code a site to work without Javascript, then sprinkle on the clever AJAXy bits in a way that doesn’t prevent the site from working with non-AJAXy browsers. In fact, the whole book seems to be infused with this progressive enhancement idea, and I really like that. One of the reasons I’ve avoided Javascript over the years is that it makes a site inaccessible if you’ve got Javascript turned off. Jeremy’s approach completely does away with that concern.
I’ve been pushing the book to my co-workers. There’s one guy I work with who is a total Javascript head. Heck of a programmer. But it’s all old-style. I’ve recommended the book to him to update his mad koding skillz. He’s too busy getting his head around CSS at the moment though. It’s funny; we have very different approaches to creating pages, but we’re both feeding off the differences in the way we work to upgrade our own skills. I keep asking him Javascript questions, and he keeps asking me CSS questions, and it’s been a huge help to both of us.
Unrelated note; I just noticed that the timestamps on your comments are a bit off. You’ve got the date repeating rather than printing the time for your second part of the timestamp.