DHTML Utopia: Modern Web Design Using JavaScript and Dom

I agree with most reviews for DHTML Utopia; the book is middle level, leaving beginners in the dust but pros wanting more. It is, however, well written and contains very good code and coding standards. If you are not completely new to JavaScript and DOM scripting, but would like to learn more and make sure your code is up to today's standards, then this book is for you. If you are very familiar with web scripting and/or have been writing your own unobtrusive client side code then go with a more detailed book.

With the "bad old days" of browser sniffing behind us, this book explains how DHTML should be done today. This book is a good reality check for those web developers who still tend to do things the old way out of habit. It shows practical real-life examples of how to separate data from presentation and behavior. It emphasizes unobtrusive javascript. I liked the examples that compared "this is how you USED to do things" with "this is how we do it now that we know better." You can go deeper with other books as this book just scratches the surface of modern DHTML.

The book has a good sense of humor, and a really good sense to tell the meanings of thing in a "readerfrendly" point of view. Some of the topics were known by me before, but after reading it, I discovered much more about them, and learned a new - and in most of the cases - unified way of solving the given problem. Fantastic book!

This book was excellent in it's coverage of "modern" JavaScript usage. Most JavaScript books try and cover JavaScript from a perspective of HTML 3.2 usage. This book takes us into the modern HTML 4.01 JavaScript usage which most browsers can handle. It is not a book for someone who doesn't already know JavaScript, but rather for the experienced JavaScript programmer it will teach techniques that may not be well understood.

Published in May 2005, this is one of the latest books with more up-to-date information on writing accessible scripts using JavaScript, CSS, and the DOM. It even delves into remote scripting, XMLHTTP, AJAX, XML-RPC, XPath, and parsing RSS feeds. All the code is well documented and can be downloaded from their site, if you know the word to look up in the book. Browser differences are well-documented, including Safari and Gecko-based browsers. For older coders, the book details how to move function calls out of HTML elements and into event targets and event listeners, as a better way to handle DOM events. Also mentioned are techniques such as specifying anonymous functions, using object literals to keep the DHTML encapsulated, coordinating client-side and server-side form validation, enhancing the use of large drop-down lists, timed listeners, delegation. Some of this was way over my head, but the method of instruction really helped me improve my coding techniques.