Simply JavaScript

By Kevin Yank and Cameron Adams

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.

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JavaScript cheat sheet

The JavaScript cheat sheet is designed to act as a reminder and reference sheet, listing methods and functions of JavaScript. It includes reference material for regular expressions in JavaScript, as well as a short guide to the XMLHttpRequest object. A description of what is on the cheat sheet follows, or if you are impatient, you can go straight to the full size JavaScript cheat sheet.

JavaScript has a huge number of methods and functions available. The cheat sheet lists these in various sections. On the left is a list of simple methods in JavaScript. On the right are DOM methods. Functions are in their own section at the bottom of the page.

The XMLHttpRequest object is relatively new to JavaScript. It is used to make requests and receive responses in XML format from a server, allowing developers to create interactivity with the server without the need for page refreshes (see the "Live Search" on the right of this page for an example). This section of the cheat sheet is a short reference to the object, containing a list of useful methods and properties, the syntax for creating the object in different browsers, and the various readyState values.

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Acrobat JavaScript Scripting Guide

Welcome to the Adobe Acrobat JavaScript Scripting Guide. This scripting guide is designed to provide you with an overview of how you can use Acrobat JavaScript to develop and enhance standard workflows, such as:

• Printing and viewing
• Spell-checking
• Stamping and watermarking
• Managing document security and rights
• Accessing metadata
• Facilitating online collaboration
• Creating interactive forms
• Customizing interaction with Web Services
• Interacting with databases

Here you will find detailed information and examples of what the Acrobat JavaScript capabilities are and how to access them, as well as descriptions of the usage of the SDK tools. Acrobat JavaScript is a powerful means by which you can enhance and extend both Acrobat and PDF document functionality.

Acrobat JavaScript is a language based on the core of JavaScript version 1.5 of ISO-16262, formerly known as ECMAScript, an object-oriented scripting language developed by Netscape Communications. JavaScript was created to offload Web page processing from a server onto a client in Web-based applications. Acrobat JavaScript implements extensions, in the form of new objects and their accompanying methods and properties, to the JavaScript language. These Acrobat-specific objects enable a developer to manage document security, communicate with a database, handle file attachments, manipulate a PDF file so that it behaves as an interactive, web-enabled form, and so on. Because the Acrobat-specific objects are added on top of core JavaScript, you still have access to its standard classes, including Math, String, Date, Array, and RegExp.

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