DOM Scripting, the book
For those of you who are web developers and do not have this book, GET IT!!! I cannot recommend this book enough.
DOM Scripting is actually referring to JavaScript and the Document Object Model. Like many technologies before, JavaScript has been abused from the start by advertisers, WYSIWYG editors and worst of all - lazy developers. Jeremy Keith has set about to repair the damage done to JavaScript by these lazy developers, a category I included myself in before reading this book. Written in a very user friendly manner, this book takes you through the concepts of JavaScript gently, ensuring the major points are not rushed.
One of the most fundemental concepts I learnt from this book is how to write JavaScript code that degrades gracefully - i.e. if the user has JavaScript switched off, the page will still load correctly. This has been so valuable and opened my eyes to the whole concept of graceful degradation, which in turn has prompted me to rewrite large portions of my PDnH Column and PDnH Tab classes.
The main reason I brought this book was to learn about JavaScript and DOM so I could use AJAX as the underlying technology at the backend of PDnH Server. I have learnt enough to start developing some interesting AJAX interfaces, but the books value is purely in good web practices IMHO. Of course Jeremy is mainly talking about JavaScript in this book, but the principles can be applied to any web technology.
For more information, visit Jeremy’s site here.
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Buy the book here. (UK only)
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