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JavaScript Programmer's Reference documents JavaScript, JScript, and ECMAScript to the degree that they're standardized, and goes on to catalog the extensions major browser publishers have added to the languages. In essence, this book is a resource for finding out how the major browsers (Microsoft Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, and Opera) implement their Document Object Models (DOMs), both standard and proprietary, and how they access DOM elements through JavaScript and similar scripting languages.
This is a reference, so don't expect it to teach you JavaScript through any sort of tutorial (though reading the object descriptions can be very illuminating, indeed). Cliff Wootton has chosen to organize his work alphabetically, like a giant encyclopedia of objects, reserved words, operators, filters, and other aspects of JavaScript and the DOM standards. A cross-reference that associates individual properties, methods, and event handlers with the objects to which they belong appears as an appendix. Once you've located the entry of the object you want, you'll have easy access to inheritance information, a syntax summary, and plain-English advice on what the object does. Tables provide implementation details for each property, method, and event handler, so you know which versions of which browsers support the language feature you want to use. There also are references to standards documents, and, sometimes, illustrations of how to use the language element in working code. Illustrations are rare but generally effective in clarifying the significance of language elements and the relationships among objects.
A cool feature is Wootton's documentation of common errors and incorrect assumptions. For example, he's included an entry on Bar.visibility, a nonexistent property sometimes assumed to exist in the Netscape Navigator object model. The correct property is Bar.visible, the author points out. The book also has some strange ways of doing things: Operators and other non-character entries don't appear up front, before the "A" entries, as is conventional. They've been transliterated, if that's the word, so you have to look up "Add" in order to find out about the + operator. Overall, this is a fine JavaScript reference, made excellent by its companion CD-ROM that includes the entire body of printed reference material (plus some extra) in searchable form. --David Wall
Topics covered: The JavaScript, JScript, and ECMAScript scripting languages, and their implementations in popular browsers as well as in standards documents. Coverage includes JavaScript through version 1.5, JScript through version 5.5, and ECMAScript through version 3. The DOM1 standard is covered fully and the DOM2 standard is covered to the extent it's implemented in Netscape Navigator 6. Effectively, this means coverage includes Netscape Navigator through version 6.0, Internet Explorer through version 5.5, and Opera through version 5. There's also some coverage of server-side JavaScript under Netscape Enterprise Server.
Synopsis
JavaScript is the scripting language of the Web. Its widespread use in web applications, and support in all modern browsers and in server-side and administration environments, make it an essential part of the programmers' toolkit. Complexity and confusion in JavaScript come not from the language, but from the number of different implementations, each with widely varying support for different APIs and standards. Written from extensive programming experience gained in developing components for a major website, this book helps you navigate those difficulties. The accompanying CD not only presents this entire book in PDF format, fully hyperlinked and viewlable with Acrobat Reader (tm), but provides a cross-referenced, lexical reference that includes over 3500 entries, giving an even more comprehensive, browser-based companion to the book.
