JavaScript Books and Resources

This text covers client-side JavaScript, starting from scratch, and is intended as a primary text for a CS1 course. The first half of the book focuses on helping its readers develop fundamental programming skills. Later chapters explore advanced topics including event-driven applications, distributed systems, and 2-D and 3-D graphics.

1. The Field of Computing
2. Programming
3. Data
4. Statements
5. Functions
6. Events
7. Software Construction
8. Distributed Systems
9. Graphics and Animation
10. Advanced Topics
1. JavaScript Language Reference
2. Numeric Encoding
3. Unicode

• JavaScript Runner
• JavaScript Playground

• Errata
• Answers to Exercises: Contact the publisher
• Lecture slides: Contact the publisher
• Additional Exercises

You can find all of the code from the text on github, though we've hosted a handful of applications here for you to run directly:

• A Simple Tic Tac Toe Game
• A Tic Tac Toe Game using an HTML5 Canvas
• Generated Barchart Display
• Generated Towers of Hanoi Display
• Displaying an Image in a Canvas
• Illustration of Animation Techniques
• Animated Bouncing Basketball in a Canvas
• Using Transforms in Canvas
• Introductory SVG Example
• Simple SVG Shapes
• SVG Curve Editor
• Interactive 3-D Sierpinski Tetrahedron
• Touch Event Example (Touch Drag)
• Gesture Event Example (Pinch and Rotate)
• Accelerometer/Gyroscope Event Measurement
• Modifying Colors with the Accelerometer/Gyroscope
• A Calendar Mashup

JavaScript is an evolving language, and can be used for more than just web applications. We've kept our text short by focusing on JavaScript's role in client-side applications for the desktop and mobile web, but there is much more to the language and even to the JavaScript culture. We've provided some short sections for instructors who wish to add material beyond the client-side JavaScript covered in the text:

• Command line JavaScript
• CommonJS
• Server-side JavaScript
• More JavaScript Style Guides
• CoffeeScript
• The Evolution of JavaScript: JS.next

• Interview with the authors in LMU Magazine

Here are two projects done by our students which you are free to copy and extend.

• Manic Monkey Madness, a 2-D demolition game, similar to Angry Birds.
• K'tah!, a 3-D adventure game. using WebGL on the front-end and node.js on the back-end.

We strongly suggest that readers keep up with the latest developments in JavaScript by visiting conference sites for JSConf, txjs, the jQuery Conference, and Full Frontal. Many of the conference talks are available in video format on the conference sites and on various channels (e.g., JSConf and JSConf.eu on bliptv, and txjs on vimeo).

For homework submissions, we like both github and jsfiddle.

A nice JavaScript shell is codeBoot.

And here is a seemingly random, and certainly incomplete, collection of even more links of interest to JavaScript programmers.

• Douglas Crockford's JavaScript pages (Required reading... the Crockford on JavaScript videos are quite good)
• JavaScript Guide at MDN
• JavaScript Reference at MDN
• The ECMAScript Standard (5th edition)
• Collection of 15 video tutorials (from 2009)
• Chrome Experiements
• WebGL Experiments
• HTML5 Doctor
• The HTML5 Living Standard
• The jQuery Main Page
• Brendan Eich

This 94-page text introduces the JavaScript language.

1. Introduction
2. Basic JavaScript
3. Functions
4. Objects
5. Interaction

• JavaScript Runner
• JavaScript Scratch Page
• JavaScript Playground

• Errata (PDF)

• Text to Phone Number Converter
• Phone Number to Text Generator
• Timeouts and Stopwatches
• Draggable Boxes
• Phone Simulator
• A Trivial Ajax Example
• A Larger Ajax Example