JavaScript Application Cookbook

Editor’s Note

Welcome to JavaScript Application Cookbook, the second book in O’Reilly’s Cookbook line. This book is different enough from the Perl Cookbook, our first offering, that it seems worth explaining. In his foreword to the Perl Cookbook, Larry Wall writes that the essence of the book is “not to cook for you (it can’t) or even to teach you how to cook (though it helps), but rather to pass on various bits of culture that have been found useful ...”

Perl Cookbook is a compendium of cooking techniques. “Finding the Nth Occurrence of a Match” is roughly equivalent to “How to Brown Butter.” “Sorting a Hash” can be thought of as “Peeling Roasted Red Peppers.”

JavaScript Application Cookbook, on the other hand, is a pure recipe book. Think of “Shopping Bag: The JavaScript Shopping Cart” as “Mini Scallion Biscuits with Smoked Salmon Spread.” Each chapter provides the code and documentation for a useful web application written (mostly) entirely in JavaScript. Prepare each recipe as Jerry has written it or just take key concepts and fold them into your own creations. (Nick Heinle’s Designing with JavaScript contains smaller recipes that you can drop into a single web page, whereas this book shows you how to write full client-side web applications in JavaScript, the only scripting language that browsers natively understand.)

Given these two different approaches, what’s our definition of a Cookbook? A Cookbook isn’t content plugged into an inflexible format; it’s a book that helps you ...