Apress - Practical JavaScript DOM Scripting And Ajax Project

Introduction

So there I was, just minding my own business, when along came a publisher asking me if I’d be interested in writing a book on JavaScript. It seemed like a good thing to do at the time, so I said yes.

I’m just kidding. No one asked me, I just showed up one day on the doorstep of Apress with a manuscript and some puppy-dog eyes. I’m just kidding again.

Seriously though, JavaScript is one of those kids we all knew when we were young who start out really ugly, but whom everyone wants as their beautiful date to the prom years later. Then they go on to Yale, become a district attorney, and suddenly everyone realizes that they really want to be with that person. Fortunately, unlike the DA, JavaScript doesn’t involve crimes and misdemeanors, since you know you don’t have a chance any other way with the DA! JavaScript has quickly become one of the most important topics in web development, one that any self-respecting web developer can’t do without. With the advent of Ajax, which I’ll talk about in this book, JavaScript has very quickly gone from something that can enhance a web site a little to something used to build very serious, professional-quality applications. It’s no longer a peripheral player; it’s a main focus nowadays.

There are plenty of books on JavaScript and plenty of how-to articles strewn across the intrawebs, any of which can be of great help to you. Far harder to come by though are real, substantial examples. Oh, you can get a lot of simplistic, artificial examples to be sure, but it’s more difficult to find full-blown, real-world applications that you can examine. Many developers learn best by tearing apart code, messing around with it a bit, and generally getting their hands dirty with real, working bits. That’s why I wrote this book: to fill that gap.

In this book, you will find two chapters on some general JavaScript topics, including a brief history of JavaScript, good coding habits, debugging techniques, tools, and more. From then on, it’s ten chapters of nothing but projects! Each chapter will present a different application, explain its inner workings, and offer some suggested exercises you can do to sharpen your skills and further your learning. The projects run the gamut from generally useful (an extensible calculator) to current ideas (a mashup) to just plain fun (a JavaScript game).

In the process, you will learn about a wide variety of topics, including debugging techniques, various JavaScript libraries, and a few somewhat unique and useful approaches to coding. I believe you will also find this to be an entertaining book, and in fact, one of the exercises I suggest from the beginning is to try to pick out all the pop-culture references scattered all over the place (try to place them without looking at the footnotes that accompany most, but not all!). I tried to make this book like an episode of Gilmore Girls in that regard (and if you aren’t familiar with the show, there’s your first pop-culture reference!).

So, enough babbling (for the time being anyway). You know what’s coming, so let’s stop dropping hints about numbers, Dharma, and bizarre connections between characters (popculture reference number 2!), and get on with the good stuff. Let’s get on with the show!