Beginning JavaScript with DOM Scripting and Ajax

Beginning JavaScript with DOM Scripting and Ajax will take you from knowing absolutely nothing about JavaScript to being able to manipulate the DOM, build basic Ajax applications and more.

Most of us who have been building websites since the pre-Ajax days learned JavaScript through a mish-mash of one-off scripts, validations, etc. If a book like this had been around, it surely would’ve offered a nice clean overview of the techniques available to the JavaScript programmer.

Luckily for the novice JavaScript programmer (or intermediate developer wishing to hone his craft), Beginning Javascript with DOM Scripting and Ajax does exist now and is the perfect way to learn the fundamentals from the ground up. The 2nd part of the book also focuses on Ajax and some of the interesting hacks one can use in that realm.

The author, Christian Heilmann, has a geeky sense of humor that keeps the reading light — for eaxmple Et Tu, Cache? (pg. 309):

Safari is the main offender as it caches the response status and does not trigger the changes (remember that the status returns the HTTP code 200, 304 or 404) any longer.

Adding this snippet tells the browser to test whether the data has changed since a certain date, i.e.:

request.setRequestHeader( ‘If-Modified-Since’, ‘Thu, 06 Apr 2006 00:00:00 GMT’);
request.send( null );

A bit out of context here, but just one example of the kind of thing you’ll find in Beginning JavaScript with DOM Scripting and Ajax.