In my opinion, the best "how to" book on JavaScript for someone like myself - a novice in both JavaScript and programming. I spent a fair amount of time reading online reviews and followed that by examining the books at the local bookstore. This book concluded my search for an introduction to JavaScript. If you are someone who is looking to learn this scripting language, I have no reservations in recommending this book.

Importantly, it is very well written. I have come across tech books where the author might have a tremendous amount of knowledge on the subject... but simply isn't a fluid writer, making it dry and difficult to follow. This book is well organized, the explanations are clear and easy to follow, and the writing style is not dry. The writing style also refrains from cheesy humor - a style that some might enjoy, but I find that it can get annoying.

At 896 pages it is quite comprehensive, and (to my untrained eye) appears similar to the O'Reilly Definitive Guide in this respect. (The O'Reilly is 776 ppg. and printed in a larger font) . However, "Using JavaScript" is a tutorial guide whereas the O'Reillly is not. The explanations are geared towards the novice and include simple examples of the code that can be typed in to see how it functions in the browser. The O'Reilly guide relies more on verbal explanations - which, for the beginner like myself, aren't that helpful as I can't relate the explanation to its actual working function.

The earlier chapters of this book carefully explain everything and provide easy to follow examples. The scripts become more complex as the book progresses. The included scripts cover, I assume, most of the stuff you'd need to know to add basic functionality to a web page... in this respect it acts like a cookbook such as the JavaScript Quick Start Guide. Unlike the Quick Start Guide, however, this book goes far deeper into explaining the mechanics of JavaScript and is much more useful in this regard.

This book should get anyone who understands the C programming language and HTML up and running in a few days. Do things like use Javascript to check for certain conditions, the web browser information, password protection, shopping cart and such. The book is an introduction so you don't see server side scripting, however, most pro webpages use a whole lot more technologies like DHTML,XML and there is a need for other supplementary material. Yes there is a need for a JavaScript language reference like Pure JavaScript. Anyway, I think I like it because it is well written.