Javascript for Absolute Beginners

Javascript is a complex language. This book takes a stab at explaining this language to a complete beginner. Having experience with the jQuery library, but no programming experience, I picked this book so I could better understand the language.

McNavage's goal is to use a friendly and conversational style of writing in this book. This works great for explaining concepts, but sometimes gets lost on the details. Personally I felt that some of the explanations got lost in the creativity of the examples. At least in the beginning, it seemed as if more time was spent going into details about a food recipe than actually explaining what the code was doing or what it means. Also in the beginning some items were just taken for fact, since he explains that he will come back to them later.

However, this is a language that requires some background and understanding of the elements involved before you can get in and do the fun stuff, so with that in mind, McNavage is very creative with his examples. There are tons of details in this book, so if you can focus on the reasons for the examples and not get distracted by the subject of the examples, you can get a lot from this book.

With all of the information, this book does seem a bit overwhelming for a complete newbie. I don't think it can all be fully understood the first time through.

I appreciate the conversational writing style. I also appreciate the thorough detail that goes into this book and I plan on reviewing the book - probably a couple times. I am not convinced that it is for absolute begginers, because I feel that there could be something more basic to present to the reader before entering some of these more complex sections. I also felt that he could have used some more usable examples early on.

Over all, this is an excellent javascript resource and will help you to understand the concepts, vocabulary, and development practices behind the language. If you are completely new to the world of Javascript, you may have to read through some of it a few times.

Images or Screenshot: