JavaScript In Easy Steps

JavaScript is, in principle, a fairly simple and lightweight language. So it’s ironic that many of the books about JavaScript are incredibly complicated and heavy. But not this one. JavaScript in Easy Steps is a slim, easy-to-follow book that contains just over 200 pages.

As with the other titles in the ‘easy steps’ series, this is nicely laid-out book with colour on every page. The code samples are syntax-coloured, the screenshots (admittedly rather few of those) are in colour – the headings, margin ‘hot tips’ and even the page edges are all coloured. This not only makes the book look a lot more approachable than your average JavaScript tome; it also makes the material easy to find (each chapter is colour-coded so you can find it using the coloured tabs on the page edges) and it is easy to follow (mini-tutorials are shown in coloured and numbered steps, and elements such as tables are shaded in coloured rows).

OK, so in short, it’s a nice looking book. But what about the content? Does it really do the job of teaching you to program in JavaScript? The short answer is: well, yes – up to a point.

As with the study of any programming language, the study of JavaScript has no well-defined start and end points. This book barely touches on some JavaScript topics such as AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and it has nothing to say about important JavaScript frameworks such as JQuery or Dojo. But that’s fine. A newcomer to JavaScript can easily be overwhelmed by too much information and this book, sensibly, restricts itself to explaining the fundamentals.

It tells you how to write JavaScript, how to do arithmetic, how to do tests and write loops. It explains the basics of the Document Object Model and how to use this to enable JavaScript to interact with web pages. It explains how to use HTML forms and so some very simple animation.

This would make a good first book on JavaScript. It certainly is not a comprehensive guide (if that is what you are looking for, I suggest David Flanagan’s JavaScript, The Definitive Guide). But if you’ve never done any JavaScript coding before, JavaScript In Easy Steps is about as painless an introduction as you can find.