Title: Pro JavaScript Techniques
Author: John Resig
Rating: 3.5 stars out of 5
Publisher: Apress
Copyright: 2006
ISBN: 1590597273
Pages: 347
Keywords: programming, javascript
Reading period: 16 September-4 October, 2007

At Cozi.com, we use the jQuery JavaScript library to do all kinds of complex and wonderful DHTML and Ajax tricks in our web client. Extremely powerful, very elegant: I commend it to your attention.

John Resig is the lead developer on the jQuery team. This book is not about jQuery, though if you work your way through it, you'll be well equipped to understand the jQuery source code.

This book covers modern JavaScript techniques, in particular, object-oriented JavaScript, unobtrusive DOM manipulation, Ajax, and cross-browser warts. It covers a lot of ground and shows the underpinnings of many of the popular JavaScript libraries that power Web 2.0 sites, showing uses of jQuery, Scriptaculous, Dojo, Prototype, and more. His examples are clean and well-chosen.

It's a good book and I learned a great deal from it. It's not as good a book as it could have been. The editing is sloppy and there are too many typos. Resig fails to follow Strunk's dictum, omit needless words: the writing is clumsy and wordy. Inline <code> should be typeset in a distinct font in a programming book. Finally, no one should talk about consuming JSON without mentioning browser security.