JavaScript: The Web Technologies Series 5th Edition

This book Is just what I was looking for and at a very good price much cheaper than the book store

I wish I could do zero, or even negative stars!Before buying this book, I read the other reviews, and decided not to buy it unless my class absolutely made me. Unfortunately they did make me buy it, and I discovered the terrible reviews are quite accurate.There are so many errors in this book- especially in the tutorials- that there is a companion site that offers corrections for each of its errors. Unfortunately, the code on the companion site is as bad as or worse than the buggy code from the book that it replaces.Chapter 6 is apparently so bad that they decided to put the entire chapter in PDF form on the companion site. As expected, the "fixed" version had buggy and incomplete code in its tutorials.If your class like mine, forces you to do the ridiculous tutorials, do not take the class if you can help it- especially if you have some prior programming experience- unless you want practice doing mindless data entry, and/or enjoy troubleshooting bad code. The tutorials essentially involve copying copious amounts of buggy code from the text into an html document on your machine. As the chapter goes on, you delete parts of what you manually typed in, and then replace it with new versions. With each step, you have to try and run the script. If there are errors, you get to try and figure out if you made a typo, or if, as often was the case, the book had an error. One tutorial, in chapter 9 I think, is ridiculously long and pointless. I had a 100 average in my class, and choose to not finish the tutorial because it took me over three hours, and I was less than 1/3 done.The only thing I can say that is positive about the book is that if you have absolutely no programming experience, it will force you to learn some basic programming fundamentals- if you can get past all the buggy code. But honestly, there are many other better books out there. Seriously try and talk to your professor before taking this class, and make sure you do not have to do the tutorials.

This book teaches the concepts that should be learned related to JavaScript but the author feels it necessary to add lots of detail that is not necessary to the final outcome. Also, there are several lessons in the book that require the student to have more knowledge than the current chapter provides. A chapter will have a question at the end of it that requires knowledge of information not covered until the next chapter.Although self-teaching and further research is a completely necessary part of any IT professional's job it is important in a structured learning situation to provide all necessary information to resolve questions in each chapter. If the information is not available in the current chapter then this can make the student feel like they've missed something or are not understanding the concepts of the chapter. This can lead to an excessive amount of wasted time searching the chapter for information that was not provided or attempting (in vain) to complete the lesson with the information provided.

It's a good book to learn JavaScript, but the mistakes are too numerous to give this a 5 star review.

The book is well written and the explanations are clear-I finally get arrays! The author takes the time to write out pseudocode AND a clear example of real code. Many of the language books I've used are lacking in one or both of these areas. Our class has found quite a few discrepencies or errors, but am unclear if they were not caught during editing or if the author possibly includes them to help improve our syntax-error finding. If the later is true-briliant idea, if the first is true-he needs a new editor!

This is how I learned JavaScript in a semester

Just to preface this, I have a computer information systems bs, and I work in the software/web industry, so I'm familiar with debugging code. However, you shouldn't have to debug code just to make the tutorials work! They're supposed to TEACH you how things work so that you can debug YOUR OWN code!! This was a required book for a javascript class I took through Univ of Massachusetts, and what a horrible textbook it made. If the tutorials would have worked, I prob would have given it 4 stars cause it's well-written as far as computer programming textbooks go. But being as I had to spend hours trying to fix his code (even the parts that were already there in the files, not the parts the tutorial asked us to add), it was extremely frustrating. I was complaining about it to a coworker, and she started talking about a PHP book author that had been that horrible. Lo and behold, when she showed me her Amazon review, it was the same author!! Don Gosselin really needs to check over his books before hurrying them to press. Pick one language and actually get it right. For the amount of money these books cost, you'd expect a book that actually had correct information, that you could learn from, that you could keep around for a reference! Not so with this one! I'd recommend staying away from ANY of his books unless you like throwing your money down the drain.

This book is frustrating. I've never read a textbook with so many glaring errors. Misspellings or typos are one thing, but this book has a ridiculous number of logical errors or syntax errors in the code samples.The book is written for beginniners with little to no coding experience (though some HTML & CSS knowledge will be helpful). It would be okay if it wasn't for the unbelievable errors you'll discover.The good news is you will learn JavaScript because you'll be forced to experiment with the code or consult other JavaScript teaching resources in order to determine why the code samples don't work.Professors - if you're considering this to be your course text for beginning coders, please look elsewhere. You'll be inundated with questions from students.