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Reviewer: Fernando Berzal

This is the fifth edition of a technical book that has been in print for a decade, a notable achievement in such a quickly changing environment as Web development. This thick, yet concise, clearly written reference book has been reviewed by key members of the JavaScript community, including JavaScript creator, Brendan Eich. Flanagan's writing style, always informative, and his elaborate examples, which are actually useful in practice, are a boon to professional Web developers, even though they probably detract a substantial segment from his book's potential audience. People looking for cookbook recipes might find this book overwhelming and even somewhat frustrating. For those who just want to cut and paste code snippets, I would recommend a quick Web search. A good online JavaScript tutorial would also probably be better for novice JavaScript programmers. In fact, this is not a book for beginners (previous exposure to object-oriented programming concepts is desirable), but it can be extremely useful for professional practitioners. The definitive reference would be a better subtitle for this otherwise excellent book. JavaScript is the programming language behind many Web technologies such as dynamic Hypertext Markup Language (DHTML), Ajax, and even Adobe Flash. DHTML allows users to interact with Web pages, while Ajax supports responsive user interfaces for the Web (Web 2.0, as some people like to say). Finally, the ActionScript language used by the Adobe Flash player is also a JavaScript implementation. In short, JavaScript is the enabling technology for creating a rich user experience on the Web. "JavaScript" is also used to refer to the context where JavaScript applications are executed, usually within a Web browser. Many developers mistake the language for the context, so it is not unusual to find people who, heavily influenced by platform compatibility issues that hinder their day-to-day jobs, tend to disregard JavaScript. Despite this, mastering JavaScript is still a required skill for Web developers. Compatibility issues will probably exist forever, but poor design practices can be corrected. For instance, you can resort to the "unobtrusive JavaScript" programming style advocated for in this book, thereby separating the content in HTML documents from the style in cascading style sheets (CSS) and the dynamic behavior specified in physically separate JavaScript scripts. JavaScript, as a language, is a loosely typed interpreted programming language with some interesting features. This book is considered to be the JavaScript book because its first part focuses on the language itself, separating the language from its common use within Web browsers. It clearly tackles all of the topics you might find in a good programming language reference, from its syntactic details concerning literals, expressions, and statements, to its loose type system and its support for modularization. In JavaScript, functions are first-order language elements, as in functional languages. You can also create pseudo classes using constructor functions. Instead of relying on class-based inheritance, as most object-oriented languages do, JavaScript uses prototype-based inheritance. Finally, JavaScript also allows mixins, that is, borrowing methods without inheriting. Flanagan has done a great job describing the language, and this part of the book alone, which delves into JavaScript innards, justifies its price. As a bonus, you will also learn how to script Java applications using JavaScript. This capability, whose origins trace back to Netscape LiveConnect, has been included as a standard feature in Java 6. The second part of the book focuses on client-side JavaScript: the use of JavaScript in Web browsers. Through its 360 pages, you will learn how to deal with browser windows through the Window object and how to manipulate Web page contents by means of the HTML document object model (DOM). Adding dynamic behavior with event handlers, controlling user input in HTML forms, and storing data in cookies are some of the most common tasks you will learn how to perform. As you might expect, you will find dedicated chapters to popular Web technologies, such as hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) scripting (also known as Ajax) and Extensible Markup Language (XML), from Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) style sheets to simple object access protocol (SOAP) Web services. The book also describes different techniques for dealing with images in order to dynamically create graphs and charts. The last chapter in this detailed survey of client-side JavaScript describes how to script Java applets and Flash movies. The third and fourth parts of this huge book include a comprehensive application programming interface reference for core and client-side JavaScript classes, respectively. These Javadoc-like glossaries describe each object, property, and method in the JavaScript libraries. They make clear the differences between the standard and the nonstandard capabilities that different Web browsers support. While JavaScript is an Ecma standard known as ECMAScript, and the HTML DOM is a World Wide Web Consortium standard, different versions of different Web browsers do not provide the same support for JavaScript. The availability information annotating each element in this reference is invaluable for Web developers, since it allows for the development of cross-browser compatible client-side Web applications (that is, applications that work for all common Web browsers: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and Safari). It is a pity this half of the book is not provided in digital form or, even better, as a Web page that could be kept up to date. It certainly would save some trees. Online Computing Reviews Service