JavaScript

[maxemulien]

I've been playing around with JavaScript a little recently, but the reference I've got right now is from 1998 (The Definitive Guide, 3rd edition). Does anyone have any advice for or against any more recent JavaScript references? I'm also interested in online references, but in addition to a book, not instead of one

Comments

[pmb]

Javascript is quite quirky.

But if by alternatives, you mean "alternatives for in-browser client-side stuff" the short answer is no. The longer answer is kinda - if you count things like applets and flash.

If you would like to learn more about javascript, then I recommedn searching around the web for ECMAScript. That is the standardized version of Javascript. Or you could simply ask mbrubeck directly, as he does this crap for a living.

[mbrubeck]

I've never used any print references. The online references at Netscape's JavaScript Central and DOM Central are very handy, especially the JS1.3 "Client Reference".

JavaScript is actually a fairly powerful, consistent language. It has first-class functions and a built-in associative array type. In fact, it's a lot like Python under the hood, in that everything is an associative array (string.find is really syntactic sugar for string["find"]).

[maxemulien]

Thanks for the tips.

The "quirkiness" I was referring to were a few things like just being encouraged to use semicolons (it seemed like they should have gone one way or the other) and some of the stuff with specifying the version of JavaScript being used (it almost felt like specifying version X is the only way to get these things to work, but breaks all these other things for all versions X). The latter gripe is probably something that's been cleaned up significantly while I wasn't looking. I'm less sure about the semis, but I also don't care as much.

[beautifulpyre]

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