Nice Coverage of HTML and JavaScript Interaction

Good, lucid exploration of both topics, brought together in strength and a nice reference book to boot.


ORIGINAL DRAFT

If you do web development and are interested in dynamic client-side web pages, this books brings these two key topics together. The coverage is complete and well organized, taking a good look at each of the building blocks you’ll need and moving on to the next topic in a pretty reasonable sequence. I found the material clearly articulated and always easy to understand. The book may risk failure with sophisticated JavaScript programmer, but it should satisfy most other readers with its general style and coverage of both JavaScript and HTML. If does fall a bit short of helping the reader with browser compatibility and version issues, however.

This book presents material in 23 chapters and three appendices. Each chapter is fairly short and well focussed and the overall organization is divided into four parts, "Getting Started", "HTML 4.0 Fundamentals", "JavaScript Fundamentals" and "HTML and JavaScript". Its hard to fault such a logical order. Part I includes Chapter 1, "Introduction to HTML and JavaScript" and Chapter 2, "Simple HTML and JavaScript", which together lay the groundwork, introducing tools and basic ideas, evolving the principles and covering sufficient detail to show the reader a solid ‘lay of the land’.

Part 2 approaches HTML 4.0 across chapters 3 to 9. The subtopics include text, images and multimedia, lists and documents, image maps, forms, style sheets and CGI connections. Part 3 looks at JavaScript across chapters 10 to 17. Subtopics include operators, control structures, functions and objects, events, arrays, form controls, strings, math, date and time handling. Part 4 digs into a few of the more advanced topics you might expect to see in a book like this, including frames, layers, cookies, URL history, navigator and plug-in objects, and custom objects. Together, this information is well explored and builds a solid view of the capabilities of these two technologies combined.

If you’re looking for a great overview of HTML and JavaScript together, dynamic HTML or client-side dynamic content, this book is a nice investment. It provides sufficient, well organized information to get you up to speed if this is new material for you and offers enough to make advanced content developers consider this a good reference. The coverage is well organized, making it easy to find the answers you might be looking for. Like any book, it isn’t flawless, but the material is valuable and well explored. Well worth the price of admission.