Peter-Paul Koch has written an overview of his book, ppk on JavaScript. He’s answering the question that will be foremost in the mind of anyone considering getting the book, namely “Who is the book for?”
PPK quite rightly states that my book is aimed squarely at the non-programmer and isn’t intended as a comprehensive overview of every concept. Something like David Flanagan’s O’Reilly book, on the other hand, is intended more as a reference work that examines every aspect of the JavaScript language:
Both books are exactly what they need to be. Nonetheless, I had the feeling that there is a market for a book that’s somewhere in between: a book that explains more of the technical details than Keith’s does, but not quite as much as Flanagan’s does.
It sounds like PPK has found the sweet spot.
In the end, some of the more advanced concepts didn’t make the cut but it’s certainly going to cover a lot more than my book. In fact, his book could be the perfect follow-up for people who want to take DOM Scripting to the next level:
Therefore right now the best way to describe my book is as the sequel to Jeremy’s. Once you really understand all that he explains, the time has come to immerse yourself in the more advanced features and problems of the language, as well as some nasty browser incompatibilities that can ruin your day (and your hair).
So if you’ve already read my book and you’re looking to go further, this could be the next step. When it comes to explaining the nitty-gritty issues of browser incompatibilies, nobody is more qualified than the creator of Quirksmode.
Posted by Jeremy on Tuesday, June 27th, 2006 at 3:53pm
Comments
I can’t understand. If his book not for programmers, so for whom it can be useful?
It can even be useful for project managers! I’m currently working through Jeremy’s book (Chapter 10 now, Jeremy! Still can’t get the bloody addLoadEvent to work :-) ) so I can understand a little bit more of what PPK and my other colleagues are talking about.
Jeremy, your comment is in reply to Wrench mirrors my own experience. As an interface designer I discarded client-side scripting once upon a time. Now I’m coming back to it. The hard graft of Peter-Paul Koch et al in doing the research and development that’s encouraging interface designers back to using appropriate JS can’t be underestimated. After stumbling across this post through a search to learn more about manipulating the DOM exactly because of the thoughts provolked by the research I’m about to go and buy PPK’s book and it’s "prequel" just as soon as I finish torturing myself with arrays.
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