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JavaScript for Dummies Review by Bill Holt
Obviously Obsolete
The intentions of this book are good, and it is reasonably well written (hence two stars instead of one). However, I have two strong objections to the book.
First, it is way overdue for a new edition. Much of the book deals with detecting and accomodating differences between Internet Explorer and Netscape. Internet Explorer has changed a great deal in the latest release or two, so some of the IE information is obsolete, and Netscape doesn't even exist anymore. All of the major IE competition (Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, and perhaps Opera) is Mozilla based, with significantly different behavior from that documented for Netscape, even though Mozilla is an offshoot of Netscape. Just one example is MARQUEE support, which the book documents as IE only, but which all the Mozilla based browsers support. So, a significant portion of the book is of questionable value. You will spend a lot of time figuring out why something isn't working as expected, or rewriting code to see if mozilla indeed has to bypass code that the examples bypass for non-IE browsers.
The author attempts to anticipate changes to some extent by giving links to documentation for updated information on such things as the document models for IE and Netscape, but all of the links I tried were non-existent (including the IE ones).
Second, several of the examples will not run as documented, and as they exist on the included CD. Most of these are text errors, though it is possible browser changes might explain some. For example, one sample has an included java applet (JavaClock.class), but the path name is different from the path on the CD, so it would not load the applet until that was corrected, which obviously is a textual error. Also, I had to remove ".class" from the end of the name of the class before it would load. Since I have seen other documentation which included the ".class" extention in the name specification, I don't know if this is a browser change or what. I just know that until I removed the extension from the code, all of the browsers (i tested all listed above except Opera) refused to load the applet.
I would strongly suggest to Wiley (the publishers) that they get on the ball with an updated edition. I would suggest potential buyers find a more up-to-date book.