JavaScript books

These days, Web Designers and Developers take more care in designing and building web sites. Less readily do they turn to old fashioned techniques such as GIF spacers, tables for layout, and deprecated HTML elements, which can cause accessibility/usability problems and are just plain bad practice.

There are three main technologies married together to create usable, standards-compliant web designs – XHTML for data structure, Cascading Style Sheets for styling your data, and JavaScript for adding dynamic effects and manipulating structure on the fly using the Document Object Model.

This book is about the latter of the three. "DOM Scripting: Web Design with JavaScript and the Document Object Model" gives you everything you need to start using JavaScript and the Document Object Model to enhance your web pages with client-side dynamic effects. We start off by giving you a basic crash course in JavaScript and the DOM, then move on to provide you with several real world examples built up from scratch including dynamic image galleries and dynamic menus, and show you how to manipulate web page style using the CSS DOM, and create markup on the fly.

JavaScript is a powerful, object-based scripting language; JavaScript programs can be embedded directly in HTML web pages. When combined with the Document Object Model (DOM) defined by a web browser, JavaScript allows you to create Dynamic HTML content and interactive client-side web applications. JavaScript syntax is based on the popular programming languages C, C++, and Java, which makes it familiar and easy to learn for experienced programmers. At the same time, JavaScript is an interpreted scripting language, providing a flexible, forgiving programming environment in which new programmers can learn.

JavaScript: The Definitive Guide provides a thorough description of the core JavaScript language and both the legacy and standard DOMs implemented in web browsers. The book includes sophisticated examples that show you how to handle common tasks, like validating form data, working with cookies, and creating portable DHTML animations. The book also contains detailed reference sections that cover the core JavaScript API, the legacy client-side API, and the W3C standard DOM API, documenting every JavaScript object, method, property, constructor, constant, function, and event handler in those APIs.

This fourth edition of the bestselling JavaScript book has been carefully updated to cover JavaScript 1.5 (ECMAScript version 3). The book also provides complete coverage of the W3C DOM standard (Level 1 and Level 2), while retaining material on the legacy Level 0 DOM for backward compatibility.

JavaScript: The Definitive Guide is a complete programmer's guide and reference manual for JavaScript. It is particularly useful for developers working with the latest standards-compliant web browsers, like Internet Explorer 6, Netscape 6, and Mozilla. HTML authors can learn how to use JavaScript to build dynamic web pages. Experienced programmers can quickly find the information they need to start writing sophisticated JavaScript programs. This book is an indispensable reference for all JavaScript programmers, regardless of experience level.

Practical JavaScript, DOM, and Ajax Projects is ideal for web developers already experienced in JavaScript who want to take their knowledge to the next level. It presents 10 complete example projects for you to learn from and adapt for use in your own work.

The book starts with a quick recap of the fundamentals of modern JavaScript development before moving right along to the applications. For each application, you are taken through the planning, design, and implementation stages. Theres something for everyone herea utility library, a validation framework, a GUI widget framework, a dynamic event calendar application, a drag-and-drop shopping cart, and more!

Over the course of the book, author Frank Zammetti covers JavaScript best practices, Ajax techniques, and some of the most popular JavaScript libraries, such as Prototype, Script.aculo.us, and the Yahoo YUI. One of the main premises of this book is to help you learn by example so you can then apply your knowledge to your own projects. This book will save you countless hours of development time and help further your JavaScript knowledge!

HTML5 opens up a plethora of new avenues for application and game development on the web. Games can now be created and interacted with directly within HTML, with no need for users to download extra plugins, or for developers to learn new languages. Important new features such as the Canvas tag enable drawing directly onto the web page. The Audio tag allows sounds to be triggered and played from within your HTML code, the WebSockets API facilitates real-time communication, and the local storage API enables data such as high scores or game preferences to be kept on a user's computer for retrieval next time they play. All of these features and many more are covered within The Essential Guide to HTML5.
The book begins at an introductory level, teaching the essentials of HTML5 and JavaScript through game development. Each chapter features a familiar game type as its core example, such as hangman, rock-paper-scissors, or dice games, and uses these simple constructs to build a solid skillset of the key HTML5 concepts and features. By working through these hands on examples, you will gain a deep, practical knowledge of HTML5 that will enable you to build your own, more advanced games and applications.

• Concepts are introduced and motivated with easy-to-grasp, appealing examples
• Code is explained in detail after general explanations
• Reader is guided into how to make the examples 'their own'

• Use HTML5 and JavaScript to create interactive web sites
• Program in JavaScript with the new HTML5 features
• Draw on canvas and place text on the canvas
• Create animated scenes using timing events
• Handle mouse events for interaction with the user/player
• Important concepts useful in any programming language/environment
• HTML tags, canvas, Math.random, setInterval, setTimerout, addEventListener, Date, localStorage and other features

Anyone who wants to make interactive websites. This book is suited for:

• Total beginners
• Those who have done some HTML but are afraid to do any programming
• Those with some experience with HTML, JavaScript, or Flash ActionScript but who are unfamiliar with the new features in HTML5

1. The Basics
2. Dice Game
3. Bouncing Ball
4. Cannonball and Slingshot
5. The Memory (aka Concentration) Game
6. Quiz
7. Mazes
8. Rock, Paper, Scissors
9. Hangman
10. Blackjack

Larry Ullman's Modern JavaScript: Develop and Design teaches the JavaScript language as it is used today. The book embraces JavaScript's best practices including key Web development approaches such as progressive enhancement. The book teaches everything readers need to know to understand and use JavaScript, including the most important aspects of what JavaScript is today. Tons of real-world code is demonstrated using both hand-written JavaScript and JavaScript frameworks.

HTML5 is not just a replacement for plugins. It also makes the Web a first-class development environment by giving JavaScript programmers a solid foundation for building industrial-strength applications. This practical guide takes you beyond simple site creation and shows you how to build self-contained HTML5 applications that can run on mobile devices and compete with desktop apps.

You’ll learn powerful JavaScript tools for exploiting HTML5 elements, and discover new methods for working with data, such as offline storage and multithreaded processing. Complete with code samples, this book is ideal for experienced JavaScript and mobile developers alike.

• Store session data in the browser with local storage objects
• Save trips to the server: store larger amounts of data with IndexedDB
• Give browsers limited access to a user’s system to read and upload files
• Take your app offline—and speed up page loading when it’s online
• Use Web Workers to create multithreaded applications
• Transfer data between browser and server more efficiently with Web Sockets
• Learn about HTML5 tags for forms, multimedia, graphics, and geolocation

"HTML5 is all the rage these days, but it's more than just a buzzword. Programming HTML5 Applications provides the knowledge to guide you through all the new technologies needed to make modern web applications."
--Ralph Whitbeck, cohost of The Official jQuery Podcast

Learning jQuery : Better Interaction Design and Web Development with Simple JavaScript Techniques. This book is for web designers who want to create interactive elements for their designs, and for developers who want to create the best user interface for their web applications. The reader will need the basics of HTML and CSS, and should be comfortable with the syntax of JavaScript. No knowledge of jQuery is assumed, nor is experience with any other JavaScript libraries required.

The jQuery JavaScript framework is a rising star in the world of web development. JavaScript frameworks in general have grown to become immensely popular in the past few years in parallel with the ever-increasing presence of JavaScript-driven, so-called Web 2.0 websites that make heavy use of technologies like AJAX and JavaScript in general for slick graphical enhancements that would be impossible or much more cumbersome to incorporate without JavaScript.

jQuery’s mission as a JavaScript library is simple — it strives to make the lives of web developers easier by patching over certain portions of cross-browser development and by making other tasks commonly needed by developers much easier. jQuery has the real, proven ability to reduce many lines of plain-vanilla JavaScript to just a few lines, and, in many cases, just a single line. jQuery strives to remove barriers to JavaScript development by removing redundancy wherever possible and normalizing cross-browser JavaScript development in key areas where browsers would otherwise differ, such as Microsoft’s Event API and the W3C Event API, and other, more remedial tasks like getting the mouse cursor’s position when an event has taken place.

jQuery is a compact, lightweight library that currently works in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser from version 6 on, Firefox from version 1.5 on, Safari from version 2.0.2 on, Opera from version 9 on, and Google’s new Chrome browser from version 0.2 on. Getting started with jQuery is very easy — all you have to do is include a single link of markup in your HTML or XHTML documents that includes the library. Throughout this book, I demonstrate jQuery’s API (Application Programming Interface) components in detail and show you how all the nuts and bolts of this framework come together to enable you to rapidly develop client-side applications.

I also cover the jQuery UI library, which makes redundant user-interface (UI) tasks on the client side ridiculously easy and accessible to everyday web developers who might not have much JavaScript programming expertise. Have you ever wondered how websites make virtual pop-up windows using JavaScript, HTML, and CSS? The jQuery UI library provides the ability to create these pop-up windows and includes the ability to animate transitions like fading the window on and off, or having it re-size from very small to full sized. The jQuery UI library gives you the ability to use animations and transitions using JavaScript, markup, and CSS that you may have thought previously could only have been done with Adobe’s Flash player.

What This Book Covers

This book covers the jQuery JavaScript framework and the jQuery UI JavaScript framework and demonstrates in great detail how to use the jQuery framework to get more results more quickly out of JavaScript programming. I cover each method exposed by jQuery’s API, which contains methods to make common, redundant tasks go much more quickly in less code. Some examples are methods that help you to select elements from a markup document through the DOM and methods that help you to traverse through those selections and filter them using jQuery’s fine-grained controls. This makes working with the DOM easier and more effortless. I also cover how jQuery eliminates certain cross-browser, cross-platform development headaches like the event model; not only does it eliminate these headaches, but it also makes it easier to work with events by reducing the amount of code that you need to write to attach events. It even gives you the ability to simulate events.

Later in the book, I cover how you can leverage the jQuery UI library to make graphically driven UI widgets. jQuery gives you the ability to break content up among multiple tabs in the same page. You have the ability to customize the look and feel of the tabs, and even to create a polished look and feel by providing different effects that come in when you mouse over tabs and click on them. The jQuery UI library also makes it easy to create accordion sidebars, like the one on Apple’s Mac website. These sidebars have two or more panels, and when you mouse over an item, one pane transitions to another via a smooth, seamless animation wherein the preceding pane collapses and the proceeding pane expands.

The jQuery UI library also gives you the ability to make any element draggable with the mouse; by clicking and holding and moving the mouse, you can move elements around on a page. It also makes it really easy to create drag-and-drop user interfaces. This can be used to make a dropping zone where you take elements from other parts of the page and drop them in another, as you would in your operating system’s file manager when you want to move a folder from one place to another. You can also make lists that are sortable via drag-and-drop, rearranging elements based on where you drop them. You can also have a user interface where you drag the mouse cursor to make a selection, as you would in your operating system’s file manager when you want to select more than one file. Then jQuery UI also exposes the ability to re-size elements on a page using the mouse. All of those neat things that you can do on your computer’s desktop, you can also do in a web browser with jQuery UI.

jQuery UI also provides a widget for entering a date into a field using a nice, accessible JavaScript-driven calendar that pops up when you click on an input field.

You can also make custom pop-up dialogues that are like virtual pop-up windows, except they don’t open a separate browser window — they come up using markup, CSS, and JavaScript.

Another widget that jQuery UI provides is a graphical slider bar, similar to your media player’s volume control.

As jQuery has done for JavaScript programming in general, jQuery UI strives to do for redundant graphical user interface (GUI) tasks. jQuery UI gives you the ability to make professional user-interface widgets with much less development effort.

This book is for anyone interested in doing more with less code! You should have a basic understanding of JavaScript. I review some basic JavaScript programming concepts, such as the Event API, but I do not go into great detail about the JavaScript language itself. You’ll want to have at least a basic grasp of the Document Object Model, or DOM, and basic JavaScript programming syntax. Additionally, you’ll need to know your way around CSS and HTML, since knowledge of those technologies is also assumed. A complete beginner might be able to grasp what is taking place in the examples in this book but might not understand certain terminology and programming concepts that would be presented in a beginner’s JavaScript guide, so if you are a beginner and insist with pressing forward, I recommend doing so with a beginning JavaScript book on hand as well. Specifically, I recommend the following Wrox books for more help with the basics:

• Beginning Web Programming with HTML, XHTML, and CSS, 2nd ed. (2008), by Jon Duckett
• Beginning CSS: Cascading Style Sheets for Web Design, 2nd ed. (2007), also written by yours truly.
• Beginning JavaScript, 3rd ed. (2007), by Paul Wilton and Jeremy McPeak

For further knowledge of JavaScript above and beyond what is covered in this book, I recommend Professional JavaScript for Web Developers, 2nd ed. (2009), by Nicholas C. Zakas.

The Web doesn¿t stand still¿not even for a minute¿and neither do the languages that Web pages are based on. That¿s why you need this eagerly anticipated update to the popular JavaScript for the World Wide Web: Visual QuickStart Guide. Through a combination of task-based instruction and strong visuals, best-selling authors and Web gurus Tom Negrino and Dori Smith take you step by step through all of today¿s JavaScript essentials: creating navigation bars and other user interface elements, producing dynamic images and smart forms, controlling and detecting browsers, creating and manipulating windows, validating user entries in Web forms, and more. Whether you¿re a beginning scripter who wants a thorough introduction to the topic or a more advanced scripter who needs a convenient reference, you¿ll find what you need here¿in straightforward language peppered with tips and techniques drawn from the authors¿ years of experience. By the end of the volume, you¿ll be able to smoothly integrate HTML, JavaScript, and CSS to bring your Web sites to life.

Get the hands-on, step-by-step guide to learning JavaScript for Web development. Even with no programming experience, you can teach yourself the essentials of working with the JavaScript programming language one step at a time. With STEP BY STEP, you work at your own pace through hands-on, learn-by-doing exercises. Whether you re building skills for your career or just want to customize your personal Web site, you ll learn the core capabilities and fundamental techniques for working with JavaScript and begin to create professional-looking Web sites. Includes a companion CD with code samples, data sets, and a fully searchable eBook.

Key Book Benefits

Features easy-to-follow, logically planned lessons to help you learn at your own pace

Delivers a solid understanding of how to use JavaScript to build custom Web sites

Includes a companion CD with code samples, data sets, and a fully searchable eBook