Thomas Powell - JavaScript The Complete Reference 3rd Edition

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Thomas A. Powell (tpowell@pint.com) is the founder and CEO of PINT, Inc., a nationally known Web development and consulting firm. He is also the founder of a number of long-running software firms, including ZingChart (zingchart.com), a JavaScript charting and visualization library vendor; and Port80 Software (port80software.com), a maker of Web server security and performance software. He has written numerous books, including HTML & CSS: The Complete Reference, Ajax: The Complete Reference, Web Design: The Complete Reference, Web Site Engineering, and numerous others. Mr. Powell also teaches Web development classes for the University of California, San Diego Computer Science and Engineering Department, as well as for the Information Technologies program at UCSD Extension. He holds a B.S. from UCLA and an M.S. in Computer Science from UCSD.

Fritz Schneider is a Staff Software Engineer at Google where he leads web serving and UI infrastructure projects. His past work includes a social web startup acquired by Google, contributions to anonymizing web proxies, and a prior stint at Google where he improved browser security by founding the Safe Browsing project. He holds a B.S. in Computer Engineering from Columbia and an M.S. in Computer Science from UCSD.

Christie Sorenson is a senior software engineer at ZingChart. She has worked on JavaScript-based systems in analytics, content management, and business applications since 1997 and has been fascinated with the evolution of the language and its users. She has collaborated with Thomas on numerous other projects, including Ajax: The Complete Reference and HTML & CSS: The Complete Reference . She has a B.S. in Computer Science from UC San Diego and now lives in San Francisco with her husband Luke and daughters, Ali and Keira. As a lifelong fan of the San Francisco Giants, any references in this book to the team are solely due to her influence.

Much has changed in the decade between this and the last edition of this book, but one thing has stayed the same: getting a book this size out the door takes a whole lot of help and patience from a large number of people. Ill thank a few of them here and hope that the rest understand that I am grateful for all of the help and latitude they have given me over the course of this long project.

First off, my wonderful wife, Sylvia, and my children, Graham, Olivia, and Desmond, always gave me reasons why I should leave the world of JavaScript and take a break. My long-time collaborator, Christie Sorenson, helped in too many ways to enumerate here, so much so that she was even pulled in to do the technical edit of the book. Rob McFarlane helped by creating line art manuscript again and will sadly cringe seeing new clip art thrown over his work by the production department. Sorry, Robthey have their rules! I wont name all of the people at my company and beyond with whom I interacted and who influenced me or helped me shape the JavaScript content in the book, but a few warrant a shout-out, including Mike silkjs Schwartz, Tom the Man Maneri, D. Sargent, Joe Lima, Adrian Zaharia, and Allan Pister. Kyle Simpson also should be mentioned for his helpful and diligent assistance in some of the chapter materials on object and performance.

I should give special thanks to the folks at McGraw-Hill for helping this book make its long, slow journey to paper. Megg Morin, in particular, whom I have worked with for approaching a decade now, probably wanted to quote the actor Danny Glovers most famous line on a daily basis while dealing with this book. I believe, in fact, that in the distant future, Having the patience of Megg may become a common phrase. I also must not forget LeeAnn Pickrell, Stephanie Evans, Janet Walden, Joya Anthony, and, I am sure, many others who kept this process going.