Stoyan Stefanov - JavaScript for PHP Developers

Beijing Cambridge Farnham Kln Sebastopol Tokyo

First and foremost, big thanks and gratitude to my second-time reviewers who helped me with JavaScript Patterns before, the Three Musketeers and dArtagnan: the ever-so-amazing Andrea Giammarchi, Asen Bozhilov, Dmitry Soshnikov, and Juriy kangax Zaytsev. As with the previous book, they helped me tremendously with their deep knowledge and experience with JavaScript, their attention to detail, and their determination to have technical accuracy above all. They would often comment on some of my bold general statements with: Hmm, this is not entirely correct and not always true, because. I am forever in debt to these four ridiculously talented developers who also happen to be great and friendly people.

Many thanks to Chris Shiflett and Sean Coates. They made sure the PHP side of things made sense, but whats more, this whole book started as a post on their PHPAdvent (now WebAdvent.org) blog, followed by a talk at the ConFoo conference, which Sean helps organize.

Next, thanks to the Facebook engineers who hang out in the JavaScript group. I posted an early draft there asking for comments. Three people even went through the whole thing and gave me invaluable feedback and further nitpicking, which is the best quality in a technical reviewer. Thanks to Alok Menghrajani, James Ide, and Alex Himel.

Finally, thanks to Randy Owens who read the early release of the book and meticulously filed tens of errata reports.

To Nathalie, Zlatina, and Eva

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JavaScript is the language of the browser. Its also the language that allows you to build increasingly diverse types of client, server, desktop, mobile, and shell applications. HTML5 continues the trend of allowing you to build rich applications (formerly known as RIA, Ajax, and DHTML) with new features such as local storage, databases on the client, geolocation, image, and audio and video APIsall exposed and scriptable with JavaScript. Fluency in JavaScript is a must for every web developer today.

This book is for the PHP developer whos learning JavaScript from the ground up. Both languages look deceptively close because they both share the similar C-like syntax. But they differ in many concepts, such as object creation, classes, and prototypes, which are critical to mastering each language. The book draws on your previous experience and so it wont put you to sleep explaining the most trivial topics such as conditions and loops. At the same time, the book is a complete reference: all the important information is here, emphasizing the differences with PHP and glossing over the similarities.