Does "Pro CSS and HTML Design Patterns" cover JavaScript? Pro CSS and HTML Design
Patterns does not teach JavaScript and it is not about JavaScript, but it does contain a few design patterns that use JavaScript. The purpose of these patterns is to show best practices for using JavaScript to style XHTML using CSS.
One best practice for using JavaScript with CSS is to use JavaScript to modify the class attributes of an element to dynamically change how the element is styled. This is the best way for JavaScript to modify the style of an element: CSS defines the style through a class and JavaScript dynamically assigns classes to elements.
As a complement to the best practice of using JavaScript to modify only the class attributes of elements, my book advocates selecting XHTML elements in JavaScript using the CSS selector syntax. This approach allows you to use the same CSS selectors to select elements in CSS and in JavaScript. Using the same selector syntax makes CSS and JavaScript code more intuitive and more maintainable. You have to read Chapter 17 of my book to see how cool this is.
To select elements in JavaScript using CSS selector syntax, you need a JavaScript library. I provide just such a library in my book. It is modular and extensible, and it makes it easy to dynamically style elements using this technique.
Lastly, I show you in the book how to use JavaScript without inserting a single line of JavaScript into the body of an HTML document! This is really cool stuff and makes for a very clean separation of design (CSS), structure (XHTML), and interaction (JavaScript)!