I had waited a while to actually come up with a book that i can speak about, and i must say that i found this one to be far more respectible than some of the other books i have read. It is often times difficult to know which reviews to really follow because you are never really sure of the mental health/quality of those who come up with the reviews. Seems like the prism of subjectivity is a difficult barrier to transcend. Very few people can honesty speak with authority, and objectivity in their criticisms of another. At any rate, there are 2 books that i have actually bought on the subject of Ja--Script (aka Javascript), and out of the 2, this one by John Pollock was far more "clean-cut" with regards to its presentation of the subject matter than "JavaScript for the World Wide Web" by Tom Degrino, and Dori Smith. In terms of examples, and brief explanations, the aforementioned wasn't bad, but in terms of explanatory breadthe, and in terms of depth, and in terms of interconnectivity between one chapter and another, the book was lacking.
Additonally, this book (the one by Tom, and Dori)took up an aweful lot of space in including HTML tags when it presented a coded page example that i thought was stupid. For me, if a person already knows what a tag is, and they have in fact created Tables, then there was really no point to including an actual webpage code (in its entirety) so that a person knows the difference between the head section, and body section of a document. For me, if you really need the over-board use of illustratives idiagrams to make a point about how you can make a reference "call" between the body portion of a document, and the head portion, then seriously speaking, you need to learn HTML first before you get into Ja--Scripting. This too me was wasted typing space for a much more relevant inclusions of the subject matter. For this reason, i found John Pollocks book by far more commanding of my respect.
And this for the record is not to say that for whatever reasons there is not always an inclusion of an actual webpage code in it's entirity. Johns Book did include tags for contextualisation purposes, but still, it was not as bad the other book. This doesn't really make sense to me. Or at least, not totally. There is only a few things one needs to know that is of major importance, and that is the tags, and how to make a reference to an external file. And to be honest, all you would need is a few pages that explains how the tags are created, and where they are created. But over and beyond this, i find the excess use of HTML tags in an example about a different language annoying. This is like calling a book "BaseBall Basics," but half the book is filled up with concepts that relate to FootBall. If there is going to be inclusion of more than one subject specifically, then use a different title. Otherwise stick with the name of the title. But over all, John Pollocks book so far was the better of the 2.
If we are to speak of flaws, i would say that the primary flaw of the book was it's lack of interconnection between chapters. Don't get me wrong, as far as learning the name of rules, and syntical symbols of the language, the book was great. However, most of the subjects discussed in what he called "modules" instead of "chapters" did not really build on one another. These chapters for the most part were isolated concepts and did not necessarily interconnected them, so that you can see how a whole system of these concepts can build some rather impressive effects that are not achievable with HTML. The general feel of the book was really grammatical, and analogically referencial rather than an actual collection of class study examples that hammer down the main concepts of the programming language known as JavaScript. But over, and beyond this, i found the book far more effective in geting its lessons accross than the other book mentioned.
The key to the book is its title. It is geared towards an introduction into this language, and not necessarily towards those more interested in higher levels of programming skills. For this reason i think the book will fall short of really showing thorough examples of the over all power of this programming language. But if you want to practise in a bath tub before you jump into the ocean for a marathon of some sort, this is a great book for that. It really does a great job at discussing the alphabet of the language. But it doesnt really get you to reading at a decent level. This is my analogy for how this book should be viewed: This book is great if you don't want to be thrown to the sharks.
I have not read any of the books by Danny Goodman, but from what i have ran into on amazons linking adventures, he seems to be a popular author with DHTML, and Ja--Script. His books presumably are college level rather than kindergarten in the sense that all you are learning are the A,B,Cs of things. I will have to reread John Pollocks book again, before i jump onto the Bible series of this language.
