Book review: 'JavaScript Step by Step' by Steve Suehring

When I first received the PDF copy of the 500+ page "JavaScript Step by Step," (Second Edition) by Steve Suehring, I was predisposed not to like it very much. It's a Microsoft Press book (released through O'Reilly), and I'm not much of a Microsoft person.

But Suehring's Javascript book -- aimed squarely at beginning programmers and not just Javascript beginners -- explains things that other books don't (especially in the valuable first 50 or so pages) and keeps you interested with a writing style more engaging than most. A good technical-book writer is a rarity, and I put Suehring in my top tier. And I read a lot of technical books.

I've spoken to a few coders about what languages a beginning programmer should learn. Which ones first, which language is "better" for a given task, and most seasoned hackers tell me that the more you work on code, the more you'll probably pick up new languages as you go along. It's the bones of programming itself that you need to learn. After that you learn a new programming language by picking up on the syntax that allows you to apply core programming concepts to a new environment.

And while many if not most coders have a favorite language in which to work, more often than not I've heard that it's a good idea to pick up Javascript while you're working on another language because most projects that have anything to do with the web need (or, at any rate, can really use) Javascript in addition to the other scripting language (Python, Perl, PHP, Ruby, etc) you're using to make everything come together.

There are very few programming books for beginners. Most of the O'Reilly books I see assume that you know some other programming language and, as I say above, just need to get up to speed in this new programming language.

But what about the person who knows nothing of loops, arrays, variables, strings, objects and the like?

"JavaScript Step By Step" is more than sensitive to the beginning programmer. That alone makes it more valuable to a huge segment of potential readers than many of the other Javascript how-to titles out there.

The Microsoft emphasis isn't as much of a problem as you might think. The book encourages use of MS development products like Visual Studio but neither mandates their use nor avoids mention of others, including the excellent Firebug extension for Firefox that I rely on in my development work as well as plain ol' text editors.

Suehring offers an introduction to AJAX and jQuery, but he doesn't base his book on use of the latter library. JQuery is important, but more important in my view is teaching beginners the core concepts of programming and Javascript itself.

If you're looking to go beyond tweaking HTML and CSS and want a gentle introduction to Javascript, Steve Suehring's "JavaScript Step by Step," is a fine place to start.

Note: The images in the PDF provided by O'Reilly for this review looked terrible. I got an e-mail acknowledging this and pointing me to a new link. At the time, the new PDF was no different from the old one. I went into my O'Reilly account again and re-downloaded the PDF. The images look much better now.