I've been looking for a new book for the 'Progrmaming with Javascript' module that I teach for the University of Exeter since the present course material is a little outdated and it's getting more and more difficult to update it every year. After a great deal of research, the book I've chosen in DOM Scripting by Jeremy Keith. It's very up to date, even though it was released in 2005, and focuses on scripting in the Document Object Model rather than just teaching handy Javascript code like other books I studied.
The author begins by covering the basics of Javascript before launching into the DOM and using examples to build up your knowledge. Then the author describes some 'best practice' concepts and revisits the examples covered earlier to bring them into line. CSS is also covered later in the book and how this can be altered using Javascript and the DOM.
The whole book is only 12 chapters so the student will not be put off by the number of pages as in some textbooks.
Some points I particularly liked about this book are it's well designed examples (so many books use old designs with fonts like comic sans ms - urrrggghhh!), the use of getAttribute and setAttribute when accessing the elements on the doucment instead of the mor direct old fashioned methods and the understanding that Firefox and not Netscape is now the main contender to IE.
Worth a read if you want to further your Javascript skills!
Ian
