A couple of days ago I received my copy of Jeremy Keith’s “DOM Scripting: Web Design with JavaScript and the Document Object Model“. I’d been thinking about checking it out for some time and a forthcoming project will require me to finally get a handle on JavaScript so the time seemed right. I really couldn’t be more pleased with it!

I’ve been trying to learn JavaScript for a couple of years, pretty much ever since I started learning to hand-code in (X)HTML and CSS. I bought a book or two as I had for the other languages but could never take to it. The examples never seemed logical enough for me and the consistent mentionings of DOM did nothing more than confuse – it always seemed that you’d learn how to sniff for different available DOMs in browsers but never it was satisfactorily explained why this was useful. With this book, that has all changed.

Mr Keith has a clear and logical style of writing. I’ve so far read through about half the book without testing any examples but I feel that I’m already beginning to understand the basics of JavaScript and using it to manipulate the DOM. Of course, his focus on the DOM as a complimentary Web-Standard to (X)HTML and CSS also helps drive the point into my increasingly addled brain. I look forward to spending some time with this book and experimenting with the evident power of this technology. I feel confident that I will finally be able to fill in the gaps in what I’ve previously been able to accomplish with websites that I’ve built. Watch out, 2006 is the year of the DOM …