Review: JavaScript & JQuery by Jon Duckett
Disclosure stuff: I was sent a free copy of this by the publishers. From 2000-2002 I worked with its author. I currently work with Mathias Bynens, the book’s technical reviewer (but didn’t know this until after reading it).
Don’t tell anyone, but I’m not very confident with my JavaScript – I learned to program in COBOL, FORTRAN, BASIC, 6502, Z80 and DCL which are all procedural, so I was looking forwards to a book that starts at the very beginning and treats me kindly, before clubbing me over the head because I polluted the global namespace and laughing at me for extending my prototypical object literal constructors into my callbacks.
The book’s blurb says “We’ll not only show you how to read and write JavaScript, but we’ll also teach you the basics of computer programming in a simple, visual way” and is the follow-up to Duckett’s hugely successful HTML and CSS Book which sold over 150,000 copies. (In tech book terms, that’s practically Harry Potter; in this industry, 5,000 is a successful book.)
The book looks beautiful. High quality paper, colour images, with real care and attention lavished on the layout and the words. I’m no quivering aethete designer, but I found it pleasurable to read even though it’s a weighty 600 page tome. Each page (or spread) is its own discrete infolump so it’s easy to out down and come back to.
It starts light – defining events, objects, methods and properties, showing the relationship between HTML, CSS and JS, and with a section on Progressive Enhancement (hoorah). However, I was slightly peturbed that the first worked example uses document.write. I can see why you’d do this – it allows you to show something, but without having to muck about appending to the DOM or using getElementById and innerHTML but it didn’t feel particularly good practice (especially as getElementById and innerHTML are introduced soon after, anyway.) In the author’s defence, he does note that this is Considered Naughty.
Elsewhere, we see lots of workarounds and IE-specific aspects of the DOM. I’m comfortable with these being there; we have to live in the real world, and I think that a book that ignores this does a disservice to its readers – it’s right to equip someone to make pages work on IE.wtf or understand what’s happening in older/ inherited scripts.
The book moves briskly after the traditional introduction to loops, variables and other syntax. By page 270 we’re looking at event listeners, including IE5-8, event delegation, mutation events (with a note that mutation observers are coming, but no more than that.)
Chapter 7 begins with jQuery. Again, there are times when jQuery is entirely appropriate. What’s good is that this book teaches JS concepts first, and always keeps the two separate. (I get tired of “JS” tutorials that are actually about jQuery.)
The rest of the book romps through “HTML5” APIs, JSON, common UI widgets and – usefully – debugging. Attention is paid to pointing out what’s standard and what isn’t, what’s vanilla JS and what isn’t. Progressive enhancement, accessibility and separation of concerns is are kept in mind throughout. This is good. You can see the table of contents.
When I’m reading, I often don’t care if I’m reading a paper book or a Kindle. But in this case, I was glad I was reading the full-colour, attractive book. I’ve railed about the shoddy quality and general unattractiveness of most computer books before. When so much information is available on the web, publishers must provide some sort of extra value. This book has it – the information is thought-through, beautifully presented and clearly explained. While I guess that the majority of my regular readers won’t need an explanation of what a loop or variable is, I believe this would be an excellent book for someone wanting to start with JavaScript, and learn it well. It doesn’t cover Promises, Mutation Observers, but I don’t really think they’re right for a beginners’ book, anyway.
Oh – and it made me realise that I’m not nearly as crap at JavaScript as I thought I was. Which is nice.
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