A while ago I bought the book DOM Scripting: Web Design with JavaScript and the Document Object Model by Jeremy Keith. The title says it quite well, this book is about using JavaScript and the DOM to extend the user experience of web sites.

The first chapter gives some background information about the history of JavaScript. Not as extensive as ppk on JavaScript, but good for beginners. Turning the page to chapter two will let us learn the basics of JavaScript.

Other chapters will learn you how to use the DOM to manipulate the document and style of the web page. Also, a chapter about animation is included and that is not widely covered in JavaScript books I’ve read. In the last chapter you’ll use the discussed techniques to build a web site extended with JavaScript and of course the DOM.

I didn’t buy the book because I wanted to learn about the DOM, but more as a reverence and a source of inspiration to learn new techniques. The reverence part was satisfied by a nice chapter at the end of the book, including all DOM methods with details on how to use them. However, this book is not a great source of inspiration for a bit experienced front-enders.

The book explains very well on how and why to use graceful degradation, separated behavior and markup and backwards compatibility. For beginners that is really cool, I haven’t seen many newbie JavaScript programmers use those techniques and it is really good they are given good information on this subject. But as said, anyone who knows those techniques already will not be satisfied by this book.

You’re new to JavaScript and DOM, and are interested in this book? I can really recommend it for you. I think you might be want to read the preview at Google Books, or the sample chapter at the official website.