Software Engineer, Photographer, Maker, & Father
DOM Enlightenment arrived at my mountain home in March along with Cody Lindley’s JavaScript Enlightenment book which actually made it into my brain. Both of these books are short and focused. I picked up JS Enlightenment and read through it while the kids played. It left me with a feeling of peace, like having tea with a friend ending with a good hug. Not much came up new in the conversation, but it was comforting.
This weekend I had a moment to finally pick up DOM Enlightenment and it reminded me of my early JS hacking days in IE and client side XML/XSLT work. So many functions… but not really. We cheat so much on the client now, throw down some jQuery and you are inserting and moving around nodes without even thinking about it. But the truth of the matter is most of the time you could just write a custom function in straight DOM. And this book has rekindled my use of the DOM. I do a lot of client side JS debugging in Chrome, and knowing my createElement() and appendChild() can be very useful.
I left the book at home near the chicken coop, and here in San Jose at work I yearned for it while wanting to test how Chrome Debugger was displaying source structure. My hand instead landed on JavaScript The Definitive Guide - the giant tome. The JSTDG is an amazingly complete book, I have the 6th edition here, but it is a bit much.
So congrats to O’Reilly for the new smaller books you are putting out, I am enjoying them.