Books For Experienced JavaScript Developers

Written by Kay Ewbank

Thursday, 28 September 2023

Article Index
Books For Experienced JavaScript Developers
Practical JavaScript
jQuery, Graphics and Embedding

Page 3 of 3

jQuery in Action, 3rd Ed

Author: Bear Bibeault & Yehuda Katz
Publisher: Manning
Pages: 475
ISBN: 978-9351199182

Ian Elliot awarded this book five stars when he reviewed the much improved second edition, saying the improvement was so marked that readers who enjoyed using the first edition needed to buy a new copy. For those unfamiliar with first edition, all you need to know is that this is a good introduction to jQuery that works its way up logically to more advanced aspects of using it and it covers the UI.

The expanded third edition adds new chapters covering how to interact with other tools and frameworks and build modern single-page web applications, along with being updated for jQuery 3.

Just jQuery: Events, Async & AJAX

Author: Ian Elliot
Publisher: I/O Press
Pages: 214
ISBN: 9781871962529
Writing for JavaScript developers working with advanced web pages, Ian Elliot covers the parts of jQuery not associated with the DOM. Specifically it is about how to make use of jQuery’s event functions, Deferred and Promise functions and its AJAX functions. While not every programmer will need these advanced features in the early stages of using JavaScript, they are unavoidable aspects of modern web programming and sooner or later you will find a need to master them all.

Supercharged JavaScript Graphics

Author: Raffaele Cecco
Publisher: O'Reilly
Pages: 280
ISBN: 978-1449393632

Giving this book the maximum five stars, Ian Elliot said it was probably the best book he'd read that year. Ian described the book as well written and full of useful and sensible discussions of how things work and how best to achieve a result.

While the subtitle of the book is "with HTML5 canvas, jQuery, and More", Ian recommended it as a general book on web graphics.

Ian's conclusion was that if you are a reasonably good JavaScript programmer and interested in graphics then you can't help but enjoy reading it.

JavaScript Bitmap Graphics with Canvas

Author: Ian Elliot
Publisher: I/O Press
Pages: 316
ISBN: 9781871962628

This is Ian Elliot's own take on JavaScript Graphics and focuses on programming Canvas. In addition to the basics of using Canvas, the author Ian Elliot goes into the skills that you need to make good use of these facilities. The book also covers how to keep graphic processes from bringing your application to a halt by keeping graphics on a separate thread or using the GPU to get the job done. Although most of the book is concerned with the standard 2d graphics context, the final chapters explain the use of WebGL with Canvas as a general purpose rendering engine, including how to use it for 3D graphics and for fast 2D graphics.

Again, we don't have a review on I Programmer, but it has a 5-star rating on Amazon and one reviewer writes:

It is packed with relevant practical knowledge, like how to get around the many quirks of Canvas, and advice on how to avoid the obvious and not so obvious pitfalls.

Third-Party JavaScript

Author: Ben Vinegar & Anton Kovalyov
Publisher: Manning
Pages: 256
ISBN: 978-1617290541

This is a book aimed at experienced JavaScript devs wanting to write embeddable scripts, according to Ian Elliot, who gave it 4.5 stars, and said that what the authors mean by the title is creating JavaScript widgets that can be inserted into other websites.

Ian said the book attempts to formalize this otherwise ad-hoc approach to delivering services to websites and it is a very interesting read. Ian concluded that overall the discussions are good with a slight hint of humour. The examples are short and to the point. The serverside examples are in Python, but easy enough to understand. His final conclusion - a good book - go and read it.

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