Murach's Javascript and DOM Scripting

I'll try to keep this short. I have finished reading this book all the way through. It's a thick book (~750 pages of to-read content at 8 inches by 10 inches), so it took me a while. I would consider myself an intermediate JavaScript developer. I have experience with the JavaScript basics and some of the advanced stuff. I also have a background in Python. I found myself breezing through the first half of this book. However, the second half took me a while longer because the content began to push my limitations. I found this book to be an invaluable guide to assist me in learning to overcome those limitations. I am very impressed with how this book presents the material in a friendly, yet well educated manner. By the time I finished reading this book, I was able to understand and use the more advanced techniques in my JavaScript projects. In my humble opinion, I wouldn't recommend this as the only book for an absolute beginner. It would help to have a second take on the JavaScript techniques covered in this book (I recommend JavaScript, A Beginner's Guide, 3rd ed., by John Pollock). Overall, you will not go wrong with this book. If you are eager to learn JavaScript and want a great training and reference book, look no further.

The book contents are as expected. Its the book that my son needed for a class. However, my son said that the binding started coming apart soon after he started using it but only just showed it to me. Several pages are falling out and the binding is split in a couple places. It must be bad glue or something. I have only experienced this with one other book but that one was years old. This one had been in use for a month and started coming apart, now that we have had it for 3 months it looks like I'm stuck with a book that I will need to tape together if I plan to continue to use it as a reference.Has anyone else experienced this with this brand of books?UPDATE!Contacted the book publisher about my problem and they are shipping out a new replacement today. This is awesome customer service! Highly recommend this company, they know how to treat their customers!Thank you Estelle!

I bought this item on Amazon after reading all the glowing reviews, but now that I've read all 20 chapters, I have to say that I'm disappointed with this book.First of all, I'm not a first-time programmer. I'm a sophomore in college and I'm getting three degrees: Math, Computer Science, and Economics. I don't say this to brag; I say it to show that I know my way around a good textbook, and I know my way around programming. I've taken several programming classes in college using C++, and this summer I have a software engineering internship with a company in Kansas City. This company said I might need to use JavaScript on the job, so I bought this book to have a foundation in the language.The format of the book is easy to read. If you open to almost any page in the book, you will see that the right-hand page has examples of JavaScript and/or XHTML code, and the left-hand page has text explaining the code on the right-hand page. A few chapters into the book, I found myself looking at the code on the right side, then reading the left page if I didn't understand the code. If all the code made sense, I still went back and read the left side to reinforce the concept in my memory. Again, this worked very well for me, and apparently many people like this style that is found in all of Murach's books.However, there are times when it seems like the text on the left is being forced. For example, in Chapter 17, after the reader should be well acquainted with JavaScript, a paragraph on the left says, "That means that the compareColumnValues function compares the values in the current sort column and returns the appropriate number. To do that, this function gets the values that are stored in the current sort column, compares them, and returns the appropriate number." This sort of wordiness and repetition is commonplace throughout the book. I feel like the author is constrained by the format. When the code on the right is easy to understand, you run into paragraphs like the one quoted above, which are long and repetitive, but when the code on the right is somewhat complex, you often find that legitimate questions about the code go unanswered.Sometimes you will run into a piece of code used on the right-hand page that you haven't seen before, but the paragraphs on the left won't address the code at all. Most of the time, these pieces of code are addressed later in the book, but often not for several more chapters. This happens quite often during the first half of the book, but even the second half can't seem to break this bad habit. In Chapter 14, p. 518, the author presents a library to work with keyboard events. In this library, the OR operator is used to assign a value from a group of values by selecting the one that is defined. In Chapter 18, p. 641, this usage of the OR operator is explained for the first time. In this instance, the OR operator is listed in the index, so you can look ahead to page 641 and confirm that you are understanding its usage correctly. Unfortunately, the index does not contain every JavaScript function presented in the book, so sometimes you just have to wait for the answer to come (or not to come).On top of all this, the book has several typos and some straight up factual errors. One extremely important function, the parseInt function, is presented in Chapter 2. The book tells you, "The parseInt method converts the string that's passed to it to an integer data type. Returns NaN if the string can't be converted to a valid number." What it doesn't tell you is that if the first digit of the number passed to it is 0, it returns the number in octal. This will always happen unless you specify in the second parameter of the parseInt function the radix (or base) of the number it should return. Also, parseInt("892F77") will return 892, not NaN, since the string starts with a number. When I was doing one of the examples in the book, I ran into these problems and would never have figured them out had I not looked up the answers on the Internet. I should not have to resort to Google to answer my JavaScript questions when I have a JavaScript book right in front of me.One last thing I should mention about this book is that you really should have a computer handy when reading it, and you need to download the files from the Murach website as described in the Appendix. I would say a third of the book is spent reviewing the code for these applications, and at the end of each chapter, there are exercises that can only be done with those downloadable applications. However, I should hope that anyone reading this book would have access to a computer and Internet, since this book is all about programming Internet applications. That being said, the applications are good. I like seeing examples of how to use my new-found knowledge. However, the most the exercises ever ask you to do is to modify the applications. I wish the book would also suggest applications to make from scratch, perhaps with downloadable solutions.All in all, I learned a lot from this book, though I don't think it goes into enough depth, and its presentation is just plain scattered. As someone who wants to thoroughly know my way around JavaScript, I feel like I didn't get what I was looking for. I certainly don't feel like I reached an "expert level" as the book said I would. I want to know the ins and outs of every function so I don't find myself scratching my head over an error and scouring the sands of Google for the answer (curse you, parseInt!). But at the same time, if I had been a new programmer I would have been overwhelmed for the first six chapters or so. So I really can only recommend this book for people who have some programming experience and want to learn JavaScript, but don't care about all the details. Even for those people though, the order of presentation is really wacky.

"Murach's JavaScript and DOM Scripting" is an excellent book, exactly what I was looking for.It has well organized material, summary after each chapter, contains code of book applications and exercises created specifically for each chapter. The book is engaging and makes JavaScript easy to learn.If you want to learn JavaScript or master your skills in it, "Murach's JavaScript and DOM Scripting" should be #1 in your "to buy" list.