Packt Publishing emailed me to see if I was interested in reading and reviewing their new book Instant AngularJS Starter. I am a huge fan of AngularJS and use it for developing single page applications so of course I said yes :) And I am glad I did, because Instant AngularJS Starter is an EXCELLENT introduction to developing web apps with AngularJS.
I joined the O'Reilly Blogger Review Program for books like DOM Enlightenment. It is an insightful and easy-to-read book about manipulating and traversing the DOM with JavaScript as opposed to an abstract library like jQuery. This is a great look at fundamentals and very useful for better understanding JavaScript libraries, like jQuery, Zepto, etc. In cases where you are creating an HTML 5 hybrid application that only targets a single browser, like Mobile Safari, you may prefer to work with the DOM purely via JavaScript. In these cases, DOM Enlightenment becomes an indispensable reference manual.
Learning from jQuery is a book for those developers familiar with jQuery and wanting to use that knowledge to better understand JavaScript and even use that JavaScript knowledge to write better JavaScript code for jQuery. Throughout the book you will see examples on how to achieve solutions to common problems in both jQuery and JavaScript as well as JavaScript specific language features to give you a better grasp of JavaScript.
Telerik recently announced the Kendo UI HTML Helpers for ASP.NET MVC, which allow you to write fluent code in Razor or WebForms View Engine to emit the necessary HTML and JavaScript code for Kendo UI controls. For those ASP.NET MVC Developers who have just started using Kendo UI, it is certainly an advantage to learning the various HTML5 Controls in Kendo UI using the wonderful code completion, intellisense, etc. in Visual Studio 2010 and 2012 while developing HTML5 JavaScript Websites.
If you are new to developing mobile websites and web applications targeting the iPhone, iPad and other iOS devices using Mobile Safari, you may be interested in a book from Apress I recently read, called Learn HTML5 and JavaScript for iOS. Although you can find plenty of books on HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, and jQuery Mobile, Learn HTML5 and JavaScript for iOS is essentially a "greatest hits" compilation of those technologies specific to those web developers targeting Mobile Safari and iOS Devices.
I grabbed a free copy of JavaScript & jQuery The Missing Manual as part of the O'Reilly Blogger Review Program. I recently just read HTML 5 The Missing Manual and really enjoyed it, and I wanted to see if all The Missing Manual books were just as good. As it turns out I really enjoyed JavaScript & jQuery The Missing Manual. Although I thought the first 3 chapters on JavaScript were rather boring and un-necessary, the rest of the chapters on jQuery provide a really good introduction to jQuery for beginners. The author begins each chapter by introducing you to some jQuery concepts and then walks you through one or two interesting tutorials on how to apply those concepts. This concepts - tutorials pattern continues throughout the book chapter-by-chapter as sort of a jQuery Cookbook, which makes it both a worthwhile way to learn jQuery and apply it in your websites and web applications. Here is a quick book review.
Many of the new books on web development and web design focus on HTML5 and CSS3. Lately I have been reading HTML5 books with a focus on the programming aspects of HTML5, like Local Storage, IndexDB, Geolocation, Offline Applications, Web Workers, Web Sockets, etc. Recently I read Head First HTML5 Programming and HTML5 The Missing Manual. Both HTML5 books are excellent for those web designers and web developers new to HTML5. In this post I am reviewing another new HTML5 book I received as part of the O'Reilly Blogger Review Program, called Programming HTML5 Applications.
As one starts to truly learn JavaScript and begin developing real-world applications with it, it'll fool you at times with unexpected and surprising behavior. This somewhat inconsistent and unintuitive behavior fills many a chapter in JavaScript books. In fact, ironically, JavaScript: The Good Parts spends just as much time pointing out the bad and awful parts of JavaScript as it does the good parts. However, now that JavaScript Development is becoming more main stream and developers are truly programming in JavaScript as opposed to just jQuery or another JavaScript Library, developers are re-thinking JavaScript. In some cases, developers are building languages that are easier to develop in than JavaScript but compile to JavaScript like CoffeeScript. In other cases, developers want to replace JavaScript with a completely different language like Google's new Dash or Dart language for the web. In this case, I would like to talk about CoffeeScript.
JavaScript is the programming language for the web. A good deal of the code I used to write using C# in ASP.NET WebForms and ASP.NET MVC on the server has now moved to the client in the form of JavaScript. Front-end development is now becoming a serious development skill and role as it moves from a sprinkling of jQuery here and there for animation and AJAX calls to use of more sophisticated JavaScript MVVM and MVC frameworks, like backbone.js, spine.js, batman.js, knockout.js, SproutCore, Sencha Touch, etc. Understanding JavaScript, and now CoffeeScript, is critical to developing web applications. If you don't learn JavaScript and learn it fast you will not survive this new shift in web development that focuses on JavaScript in the browser and now even JavaScript in the server with Node.js. Buckle up!
I was developing a new custom Orchard Module for a client last night that required custom jQuery and JavaScript code to run when the DOM loaded. The easiest way to write the code was to load the web page in the Firefox browser and open up it's new JavaScript Scratchpad that allows writing, debugging and executing JavaScript and jQuery against any tabbed web page in the browser. This allowed me to interact with the page elements as if the JavaScript code was running natively within the page. Now normally I prefer the Chrome Developer Tools, but the JavaScript ScratchPad in Firefox is much more ideal for writing and executing JavaScript than the JavaScript Console in Chrome and even the JavaScript Console in Firebug.