In developing mid to large scale web applications nowadays, it's a common practice to leverage JavaScript frameworks such as Prototype, Scriptaculous and JQuery. As the author of JavaScript Cookbook points out, "in order to use a framework library like jQuery to its best ability, you need to understand what's happening under the hood." JavaScript Cookbook provides a good amount of information on the fundamental and new features of JavaScript. For example, the book covers ECMAScript 5 features (e.g., Array object methods "forEach", "map" and "filter") with concrete use scenarios in the format of classic "cookbook" receipts, accompanied with snippets of code in the context.



Going beyond these isolated "problems", the book also provides insights into what is needed in building real world web applications in terms of good practices and pragmatic idioms. For example, when showing you how to gracefully handle no JavaScript situations, the book provides a "historical" perspective on the existing solutions, how they have been evolved over the time and what establishes the current standard of good practice. The receipt starts with the simple tag solution and presents a more concrete progressive disclosure form example in the middle; In the "See Also" section, a list of further readings (with URLs) are provided on the topic of "progressive enhancement". The book also covers more advanced topics such as how to implement object oriented programming with JavaScript Object and building custom code libraries.



Through different receipts, to depict the fast evolving landscape of front-end development, the book covers eye-catching topics such as HTML5 API such as "drag-and-drop", "web worker", filesystem access, as well as creating mobile widgets and native smart phone applications with HTML/JavaScript using open source translation tools.



As a UI developer, I've found the book a very good casual reading for me to get up to speed with the new APIs and trends and refresh my knowledge about the idiosyncracy of the language. The code snippets in the book are very complete and could be really handy to tackle some of the real-world problems.