JavaScript® Bible, Sixth Edition

Preface

For over 25 years, I have written the books I wished had already been written to help me learn or use a new technology. Whenever possible, I like to get in at the very beginning of a new authoring or programming environment, feel the growing pains, and share with readers the solutions to my struggles. This sixth edition of JavaScript Bible represents knowledge and experience accumulated over ten years of daily work in JavaScript and a constant monitoring of newsgroups for questions, problems, and challenges facing scripters at all levels. My goal is to help you avoid the same frustration and head scratching I and others have experienced through multiple generations of scriptable browsers.

Although the earliest editions of this book focused on the then predominant Netscape Navigator browser, the browser market share landscape has changed through the years. For many years, Microsoft took a strong lead with its Internet Explorer, but more recently, other browsers that support industry standards are finding homes on users' computers. The situation still leaves an age-old dilemma for content developers: designing scripted content that functions equally well in both standards-compliant and proprietary environments. The job of a book claiming to be a bible is not only to present both the standard and proprietary details when they diverge, but also to show you how to write scripts that blend the two so that they work on the wide array of browsers visiting your sites or web applications. ...