Dom Scripting by Jeremy Keith

In my time, I’ve read quite a few computing text books. On my degree course, I read lots of awful books on boring subject matter like 3D computer graphics and IT management strategies, and in my spare time I’ve read a lot of interesting books based around web design/development and all that entails. This book is my favourite so far.

Why I Liked it

The reason for enjoying this book so much was the way it spoke to me; I wish 4.5 years ago when I started my degree there had been a text book or a lecturer who could have explained basic programming to me in the way Jeremy Keith does in this book.

Here comes a tangent> I went to uni at 18, thinking I’d make a good programmer; I was good in Excel, Access, Frontpage and got a B for IT A-Level. However it wasn’t to be the case, I never got my head around programming. I struggled through the Java module and even barely passed the web development module in my 2nd year. It took me 2.5 years to find a language I could understand (hello PHP) and even longer to understand seemingly obvious things like Arrays, functions, etc.

Back to the review

The examples are slowly built up over chapters, as with a lot of books, and were set down in such a way that applying them to my real-world problems was made easy. As soon as I start to engage with a text-book I usually go off-target and start messing around with my own variations of the examples and try to modify the examples to suit my problems - usually it doesn’t work for me (you’d think I’d learn) but with Dom Scripting I was easily able to do this.

Good practice included as standard

Another reason for liking the book, was that the examples didn’t include bloated old-school HTML. So many times I’ve picked up a book and tried to learn its subject matter, whether that’s PHP or XML or both or none and the code examples often include horrific table-laden HTML that I just can’t bring myself to actually use. (I am a web standards snob pure and simple).

Bonus

I finally now understand what AddLoadEvent() is for. No more struggling trying to get multiple JavaScripts functions to run onload. Before reading Dom Scripting I was aware of the issue AddLoadEvent() but really what it was for and I was also aware that only being able to run one event onload must have a solution I just didn’t put 2 and 2 together.

Dom Scripting website

This entry was posted on Monday, 26th June 2006 at 9:00 am and is filed under Book Reviews, Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.