By Kevin Yank and Cameron Adams
What’s Covered in this Book?
What’s Covered in this Book?
- Chapter 1: The Three Layers of the Web: A big part of learning JavaScript is learning when it’s the right tool for the job, and when ordinary HTML and CSS can offer a better solution. Before we dive into learning JavaScript, we’ll take a little time to review how to build web sites with HTML and CSS, and see just how JavaScript fits into the picture.
- Chapter 2: Programming with JavaScript: JavaScript is a programming language. To work with it, then, you must get your head around the way computer programs work—which to some extent means learning to think like a computer. The simple concepts introduced in this chapter—statements, variables, expressions, loops, functions, and objects—are the building blocks for every JavaScript program you’ll ever write.
- Chapter 3: Document Access: While certain people enjoy writing JavaScript code for its own sake, you wouldn’t want to run into them in a dark alley at night. As a well-adjusted web developer,you’ll probably want to use JavaScript to make changes to the contents of yourweb pages using the Document Object Model (DOM). Lucky for you, we wrote a whole chapter to show you how!
- Chapter 4: Events: By far the most eventful portion of this book (ha ha ha … I slay me), this chapter shows you how to write JavaScript programs that will respond to the actions of your users as they interact with a web page. As you’ll see, this can be done in a number of ways, for which varying degrees of support are provided by current browsers.
- Chapter 5: Animation: Okay, okay. We can talk all day about the subtle usability enhancements that JavaScript makes possible, but we know you won’t be satisfied until you can make things swoosh around the page. In this chapter, you’ll get all the swooshing you can handle.
- Chapter 6: Form Enhancements: I know what you’re thinking: forms are boring. Nobody leaps out of bed in the morning, cracks their knuckles, and shouts, “Today, I’m going to fill in some forms!” Well, once you trick out your forms with the enhancements in this chapter, they just might. Oh, and just to spice up this chapter a bit more, we’ll show you how to make an element on your page draggable.
- Chapter 7: Errors and Debugging: When things go wrong in other programming languages, your computer will usually throw a steady stream of error messages at you until you fix the problem. With JavaScript, however, your computer just folds its arms and gives you alook that seems to say, “You were expecting, maybe, something to happen?” No, English is not your computer’s first language. What did you expect? It was made in Taiwan. In this chapter, we’ll show you how to fix scripts that don’t behave the way they should.