31 replies to this topic

[Jaepee]

It arrived in the mail today!! Yey! After a month on pre order from Amazon.com. I am very pleased with the quality of the book. The color illustrations are a nice touch. I can't wait to dive into it.
Thanks Larry
Jadon P.

[Larry]

I'm glad to hear it. I hope it meets your expectations. I keep forgetting to talk up the full color aspect. This is my first full color book, which also explains the higher price. Plus the book is physically heavier because of the color and paper quality. Anyway, thanks again!

[HartleySan]

Yeah, got it yesterday, myself, and the color pages and the new format are very appealing.

[Paul Swanson]

I received my copy on Monday. Great job, Larry! It's already cleared up some misconceptions I've had, and I'm only on chapter 2!

And I've noticed that Firefox (10.0.2) has much better HTML5 support than IE (9.0.8112.16421), not that that surprises me.

[Larry]

Thanks, Paul. Very much appreciated. I was worried that I put too much explanation in those first three chapters, so it's reassuring to hear that some of that material was beneficial even to a seasoned pro such as yourself.

Every so often while testing I had to remind myself to use a browser that didn't support HTML5, because the HTML5 validation kept triggering. Please keep me informed as to what you think as you progress!

[Jonathon]

Got mine last night, it is lovely!

[Larry]

Thanks, Jonathon. Hope you like it!

[cnusinov]

Larry - just picked up this one as well, through Chapter 3 and your work / book is awesome, really great job. Thanks!

[Larry]

Thank you very much. Nice of you to say. As I wrote above, in hindsight I worried that those first three chapters were too much information without enough code, but I thought it important so it's reassuring to hear people taking to it. Cheers!

[marcus sustain]

Thank you , although unobtrusive scripting seems to have been around for some time it's been tough to find a good source on the subject (and much more). I think its awesome that the content follows web standards , progressive enhancement and coding best practices. I also like the fact that you assume some of us have fiddled with js a bit , (probably pieced a few parts of code together and well, somehow it worked.) However, now were ready for the next step and this is definitely the book for it. Thanks again, Marcus

[Larry]

Thanks, Marcus. I appreciate the feedback. Hope you like the book!

[TonyB]

Yeehaw,

Got mine yesterday and finished the first two chapters.
I have been *using* JavaScript for a couple of years ,now it's time to learn to program with it !
This books is wonderful so far, the words flow and I can tell this is going to be a fun ride.
I learned a lot from the PHP for the Web book and looking forward to finishing this book as well.

Thanks Larry !

[Antonio Conte]

I got this books some days ago. Huge thanks for Larry who gave it to me for free. Hope I get to the level where I can answer questions pretty soon so I can pay back. We'll see. In the meantime, expect some hopeless questions from me!

Great read so far. I'm at around page 40, and I find a lot of the intro info useful. Could be shorter, but it's a beginners book. As Larry is such a great learner, and I'm familiar with events, objects and dot-syntax, I hope to pick up the language in a couple of weeks.

The only problem I have is with the layout. As I read some of it on the IPhone, the switching of text placement is a bit annoying. I can even specify odd/even page layouts, so I'd liked those to be consistent at least. Big problem, right? Haha.

[HartleySan]

Given your penchant for Web languages, I imagine you'll learn JS real quick and be able to help a lot on the JS forum as well.
I agree that the beginning chapters were a bit long, but that's coming from knowing something about JS.

If I didn't know anything, I think the beginning chapters would be a good and important read.

[Jonathon]

Agreed

[Antonio Conte]

I agree that the beginning chapters were a bit long, but that's coming from knowing something about JS.

Programming is what it is, you know. Once you understand the inner workings of references, values, objects, events, conditionals, loops and the likes, it pretty much boils down to syntax, names and those few special things you just gotta figure out about each language. Luckily, most of the stuff so far is really familiar. Just hoping it will continue on like that, but I'm sure it won't. The more you learn to know, the more you find out you don't know.

[HartleySan]

Yeah, but I suspect you'll be all right.

JS has a few things that aren't similar to C/Java, so they can throw people for a loop.
For the most part though, it's pretty simple.

[Antonio Conte]

Starting to learn something here. Most important things I've picked up so far. (For my personal understanding of JS)

- Functions are objects.(!) Probably my most important discovery. I understood so much more of the JS code I've seen over the years by learning that.
- That JS is event driven
- Those anonymous functions and nested functions
- How JS object works. Not used to that
- JSON. (The syntax all makes sense now - Should really have gotten that from the abbreviation)
- Simply that $ is a valid function name. A lot more of the JQuery code I've seen makes sense now.
- How "simple" common tasks in JS is. I talk about just doing ordinary validation/replacing values etc. Things like simple calculations that's always impressed me.

Probably something more, but these are some of the weird things I've discovered for myself as a newbie to JavaScript. I like this book a lot, Larry. Very clear explanations.

[HartleySan]

Strictly speaking, I think functions are just another datatype in JS, and all datatypes are objects.
Practically speaking though, what it really boils down to is that functions can be treated like any other variable in JS, which really makes for some interesting behaviors and possibilities.

[Antonio Conte]

I think you are partially wrong. Everything is a generic object (Before execution) where the type differs. In Java, this would be written as class Object<AnyType>. You define type, not the other way around. ( And because JS is weakly typed, it's done automatically ). The base object is generic and can be base types (integers, floats, strings) or complex types. It's here, in the last category, along with array and "normal" objects, we also find the function type. (In practice, It would create objects of a specific type, but the base object class works sort of like a "wrapper" for all objects, just like in Java.)

That's how I've understood it, and also what I would think after working in Java, but I might be completely wrong. Maybe Larry knows.