Reference Materials

Abstract: This is a short guide to additional reference materials that you might find useful or interesting.

Online References

The current base for Javascript is JavaScript Developer Central at http://developer.netscape.com/tech/javascript/.

The best online reference is the official JavaScript reference at Netscape. The reference guide for the old 3.0 version can be found at http://home.netscape.com/eng/mozilla/3.0/handbook/javascript/index.html

Unfortunately, many of the pages are rather larger, which makes for slow loading. I've set up a simple segmented version of the reference pages (with no links!) at http://www.math.grin.edu/~rebelsky/References/JavaScript/Official/Segmented/

The gamelan site, http://www.gamelan.com is an excellent starting place for finding information about Java and JavaScript.

Books

There are a large number of Java and JavaScript references. I'd suggest that you visit your local bookstore and fnd one appropriate for you, as everyone appreciates different things in books. I will, however, give my standard strategy for picking a book:

• Make a list of the most difficult problems you've encountered recently (or simply questions you wondered about).
• See how well each book helps you solve the problem or answer the question.
• Make sure you can use the book as a reference:
  • Look up a few things you already know about, and make sure it would remind you of how to do them
  • Scan for a few things you don't know about, and see if you can learn from the given description
• Check the table of contents and index

I normally have my students buy Danny Goodman's JavaScript Bible, from IDG books, as it is the best one I've found. It covers a wide variety of issues and is fairly readable. Unfortunately, the index (at least in my copy) is poorly designed and therefore very hard to use.

When I can't find a topic in the Goodman book, I often look in Using JavaScript, by Mark C. Reynolds and Andrew Wooldridge. For example, it has much better coverage of random numbers than the Goodman book. Unfortunately, it also devotes some space to extraneous topics, such as Java.

For Java, I really like Mary Campione and Kathy Walrath's The Java Tutorial (now in it's second edition). Importantly, it's also available online (for free) at http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/index.html.