JavaScript Phrasebook - Softcover

Wenz, Christian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0672328801 ISBN 13: 9780672328800

Publisher: Sams Publishing, 2006

Synopsis

Developers are hungry for a concise, easy-to-use reference that puts essential code "phrases" at their fingertips. JavaScript, and the related AJAX, is hot and there is little to no information on how to use JavaScript to develop AJAX-based applications. While there are many JavaScript books on the market, most of them are dated and few cover the most recent developments, such as AJAX.   JavaScript Phrasebook is the guide to JavaScript and AJAX that you can and will take with you everywhere. Skipping the usual tutorial on JavaScript and introducing AJAX as one of the first published works on the topic, the JavaScript Phrasebook goes straight to practical JavaScript and AJAX tools, providing immediately applicable solutions for frequent tasks and code so flexible that it is easily adapted to the your individual needs.

About this title

About the Author

Christian Wenz is a professional phrasemonger, author, trainer, and consultant with a focus on web technologies. He frequently contributes articles to renowned IT magazines and speaks at conferences around the globe. Christian contributes to several PHP packages in the PEAR repository and also maintains one Perl CPAN module. He holds a degree (“Diplom”) in Computer Sciences from Technical University of Munich and lives and works in Munich, Germany. He also is Europe’s very first Zend Certified Professional and founding principal at the PHP Security Consortium. He has written or cowritten more than four dozen books, including PHP 5 Unleashed and PHP Phrasebook.

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Introduction

Introduction

Back in 1999, I wrote a book on JavaScript. At the beginning, it sold really great, and then sales started to decrease a little bit. It still sold well enough to reach seven editions by this fall, but there was a subtle decline in copies nevertheless.

However, all of this changed drastically at the end of last year—sales went up considerably, as did sales of other titles in the same segment. But how come? One of the reasons is AJAX. The technology itself is not new, but the term is. In February 2005, Jesse James Garrett coined the acronym, and since then, the whole web world seems to have gone crazy. And although AJAX can be explained in a couple of minutes actually, it requires a good knowledge of various aspects of JavaScript. This explains the growing demand for advanced JavaScript content, and also led to the writing of the JavaScript Phrasebook.

When we (Damon Jordan, Mark Taber, and I) created the book series in 2005, we wanted to create a kind of pimped-up version of language phrasebooks: Common sentences and expressions are translated into a foreign language—into JavaScript, of course. However, unlike in a regular phrasebook, you will also get explanations alongside the code. Without it, the potential for embarrassing situations is quite high, in any language.

This book is no introduction to JavaScript. Elementary JavaScript features are covered, but we tried to put a great emphasis on intermediary and advanced material as well. The idea behind this phrasebook is that especially if your JavaScript knowledge is rusty, you will find common problems and solutions in this book. So use this book as a reference guide to quickly overcome issues you are facing during development. And explore the book to find some JavaScript features you may not have thought about before.

This book is no cookbook with long and inflexible solutions to short problems. The idea was to keep the code snippets as concise as possible so that the approach can be demonstrated; this enables you to adapt the presented technique to your own applications and your specific scenario. In order to make this possible, only the code elements that are vital for the samples to run are shown in this book. Usually, the code consists only of

Edition details

• Publisher: Sams Publishing
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0672328801
• ISBN 13: 9780672328800
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272