Javascript for beginners

Because I didn’t know much about Javascript and only used it very little, I searched for a book about the basics of Javascript. I decided to read the book “Javascript for beginners” from Mark Lassoff. The announced prerequisites for reading this book are some knowledge in HTML and that you’re interested to learn to program in Javascript.

The book is splitted up into 10 different chapters. It begins with an introduction chapter, where the prerequisites, some basic information about Javascript and the most important keywords are treated. The next few chapters are about conditions, dialog boxes, loops, arrays, functions and events. In the end of the book there are discussed some more Javascript specific topics like the string object, browser information and the document object. Like you can see the book is quite good structured, because the first few chapters cover some basic stuff and in the end more advanced topics are taught. In the end of each chapter there are some review questions to check, if you understood the things treated in the corresponding chapter. Unfortunately there are no solutions to the review questions available in the book. The review questions are always followed by a lab exercise, where you can hand on and try out the stuff you learned by yourself. The solutions to the lab exercises are provided directly afterwards.

From the beginning I liked the simple manner of expression the author uses. He explains things in an accessible way and uses always some code snippets as examples he refers to. To see what happens, if the example code or the solution of the lab exercise would be executed, often some screenshots from different browser types are provided. Unfortunately there were a few topics covered by the book, which are too basic, if you already have some experience with other programming languages like Java, PHP, or similar ones. Furthermore the book ended at a point I liked to continue reading, because the things got more and more advanced. Because of the points mentioned in before, I would recommend this book only for real beginners. People, who already have some experience in programming with other languages should have a look for another book with less basic topics.