Nick's explanations of Javascript and its integration with HTML is concise and clear; and the working examples are great for experimenting.

I'll surely be spending lots of time with BBEdit and handcoding this couple of weeks.

This book misses a full whammy 5-star rating as I found the bundled CD a little stingy on further examples and/or demo software.

All in all a good book! Whether you are a complete beginner who has not used Javascript before or an experienced web designer wanting to enhance your existing site, this book should be amongst your top references for some time to come.

For my skills and abilities Designing with Javascript was right on. Nick, the young author, uses superior examples and highly detailed descriptions on what's going on at each point in the script. Very useful.

Within hours of receiving this book, I wrote my first moderately complex script and actually understood what I was doing!! Way to go Nick, keep up the good work.

Definitely worth the price of admission.

For my skills and abilities Designing with Javascript was right on. Nick, the young author, uses superior examples and highly detailed descriptions on what's going on at each point in the script. Very useful.

Within hours of receiving this book, I wrote my first moderately complex script and actually understood what I was doing!! Way to go Nick, keep up the good work.

Definitely worth the price of admission.

Since its publication, I have given this book to four different junior Web designers (I've had to buy two copies, one for me and one to loan), and each one said it helped them learn how to code the areas that were of interest to them:

NAVIGATI0N: dropdown menus, changing multiple frames with one click, managing and changing page hrefs

IMAGE ROLLOVERS: manually change them, change via arrays, DHTML (this stuff is getting dated, but a new edition is on the way)

SIMPLE FORM VALIDATION: required fields, making e-mail forms

As some of these other reviews note, this is not a great book if you already understand programming and object-oriented concepts. If you can already tell a method from a property, buy something else (all those great JavaScript books for programmers, by the way, almost universally slight JS's visual capabilities). But if you're a beginner who is interested in manipulating graphics and menus, then this is DEFINITELY a great way to get started with scripts you can use immediately while you're building a foundation for more advanced skills in JavaScript.

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I also recommend this book: "DHTML for the World Wide Web" by Jason Cranford Teague. It also focuses on the visual aspects of DHTML, Javascript, and CSS.

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NOTE: All the code in this book works, but there are a few typos. Check the addendum sheet when you get it and write in the corrections when you first get the book and you'll be fine.

Mike Mitchell ...

Don't get me wrong, you'll understand most essential concepts behind JavaScript, but it's more like a how-to book than a fundational book.

For people who are not fluent in programming, this is a good start and this is an excellent book. For programmers, look elsewhere. (JavaScript: The Definitive Guide is a good book for those who are familiar with C++/java)

But, I'll caution even the experienced programmers, not all of the code in this book works, and there are a lot of typos. The book should have been proof read much better, since most of the typos are in the code examples. All of the typos in the book makes learning javascript very confusing and frustrating. Especially when you copy the code letter for letter and it doesn't work due to a typo(that your friend has to find for you 2 days later).

I bought the book to compliment my other O'Reilly HTML books and to start to learn Javascript. And I have taken a lot of knowledge out of this book but I also found it very useful to have another reference book on hand to explain in further detail what different pieces of the code were doing.

The author has tried to make it as easy as possible by telling you that you don't need to know certain things about javascript, when in fact, you may just need that information. I think he could have included the information on one of the many sidebars ans let you and me, the readers, decide on what information we need.

All in all, I'll didn't read through every page of the book because I got lost in reading other resource books , which I needed to explain the parts of javascript that this book didn't explain. I still use the book for reference but only as a guide on how to layout the code for a certain project or to get ideas on what to do next.