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Author's Preview to the book?

 
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Hey Stoyan,
What should we and what should we not expect the book to contain?
Have read a few discussions where you have mentioned that libraries are good and you like using YUI, keeping that in mind how do you think your book would help us if we ended up using a library like YUI?
We may be able to get hold of a few reader reviews about the book, how about describing to us - what went behind writing the book? Were there any specific audience you were hoping to target? Or any specific questions you were looking to answer? What do you think should be the javascript experience of a person planning on reading the book? In short, how about giving us an author's preview to the book.

Personally, I have always dreaded javascript and hated the time it takes to debug an mistake. (I know I am not doing it right). I have not used any of the javascript libraries extensively but was just inroduced to prototype for a project a while back. I use javascript on a need basis, and more often that not is used only for display or some basic validations.

PS: Neither www.packtub.com nor the link in your signature open in IE 6.0. They give a "Security Warning. Do you want to download the file?"

Thanks
Shikhar

[ August 28, 2008: Message edited by: Shikhar Madhok ]
[ August 28, 2008: Message edited by: Shikhar Madhok ]
 
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Hi Shikhar,

I posted a sort of overview of the contents of the book in this topic, hope you find it interesting.

Target audience? Let me see.

Based on previous JS experience:
  • people new to JS can start from scratch and learn the language. The discussions of the very basics are not too lengthy, but the plethora of examples will hopefully both challenge beginners and give them material to experiment with. If you're totally new to JS it's going to be a great discovery working through the examples and trying out stuff
  • people with copy-paste JS experience or just scattered non-systematic JS knowledge will have a chance to properly learn/relearn the language and become much better front-end developers and Web 2.0 cool kids
  • experienced developers will benefit from the advanced topics: closures, prototypes, inheritance, patterns, privacy, lexical scope, namespaces, callbacks...


  • Based on OO experience:
  • people with no OO experience will be presented with the OO concepts in general and see how they apply to JS, also how JS may differ from the classical languages
  • people with classical OO experience (OO based on the concept of classes) will definitely find a whole new and interesting world full of prototypal and functional surprises and will become better programmers with a broader view of the craft


  • It's not very modest on my end, but I like to think of the book as one that promotes "thinking in javascript", I know everyone on the ranch will tell where the inspiration for that came from

    I mentioned somewhere in the other posts about job interviews. Those have been an inspiration for writing the book too. I hope people who read the book will ace their front-end interview when asked (happens every time) "is JS OO? How do you do inheritance?". Or "how does the prototype work". Or "write me something that accepts a callback function and traverses the DOM tree invoking the callback on every node". We've been moving towards more fat-client approach in the past 4(?) years and I think client-side skills are increasingly important for every web dev.
     
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