Book Review: Modern Javascript - Develop And Design

[Saint_Michael 3]

In the seven years since I have been back in the web design gig, one name has become synonymous to web design and web programming books and that is Larry Ullman. He is mostly known for his Visual Quick Pro books such as PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites: Visual Quick Pro Guide (4th Edition), MySQL, C++, PHP and so on. Therefore, it does not surprise me when I won his newest book Modern JavaScript: Develop and Design at the Adobe User Group. That it would be loaded with a lot of information that you need to know in order to program in JavaScript. At 15 chapters and a whopping 595 pages, expect to take your time with this book because you will be learning JavaScript from scratch and I mean that literally. As you start from the basics of JavaScript to creating little JavaScript programs.

 

While this book is technical in nature, the one thing I notice right away about this book, is that it doesn't feel like that. He breaks everything down and provides great visuals and color in this book. Usually, I never talk about that in my book reviews. You could say it provides the minimalist design and hits that big pop once you start looking at the book and reading along. While a lot of the information is known, he really sticks to word modern as he talks about the Big 5 web browsers, JavaScript Frameworks, tools that he uses and or recommends and so on. As I said earlier, with his many years writing Visual Quick Pro books, it definitely prepped him in preparing this book as it provides that same kind of flow.

 

At $54.99 (Amazon $34.64), that price is well worth picking up this book, granted I am not calling it the JavaScript Bible, but once you get into it, you think it was. Thus, the reason I cannot really pick a chapter out of this book because this caters to everyone who ready to get out of HTML and into a web programming like JavaScript. So to Larry Ullman, I better see a PHP/MySQL book of the same caliber or tackle a challenging language like JSON or Ruby to make it interesting.

Edited April 24, 2012 by Saint_Michael (see edit history)