Chapter overview

• Introduction
• 1: The ABC of Programming
• 2: Basic JavaScript Instructions
• 3: Functions, Methods, & Objects
• 4: Decisions & Loops
• 5: Document Object Model
• 6: Events
• 7: jQuery
• 8: Ajax & JSON
• 9: APIs
• 10: Error Handling & Debugging
• 11: Content Panels
• 12: Filtering and Sorting
• 13: Form Enhancement & Validation
• Index

Who is this book for?

This book was written for anyone who wants to make their websites a little more interesting, engaging, interactive, or usable. In particular, it is aimed at people who do not have a degree in computer science (well, not yet anyway).

If you have ever struggled to get a script working on a web page, wanted to customize a script you have downloaded, or wanted to create your own scripts from scratch, then you are who we were thinking of when we made this book.

We can't promise to remove all the jargon that programmers use, but we can try to tell you what it means (with the aid of visual examples and diagrams) so that it doesn’t seem like a foreign language any more.

Who made this book?

These books are created by a small company called Wagon (in London), and published by a big company called Wiley (in the USA).

Wagon was founded by Jon Duckett (creative director of a digital agency in London) and Emme Stone (an award-winning, Antipodean designer and illustrator).

Their first book was called HTML & CSS: Design and Build Websites. Many people said very nice things about it (thank you), it won a fancy award (yay), and has been the best-selling book on the topic since its release (over 150,000 copies have been sold and it has been translated into six languages).

This is our second book, and we hope there will be many more to come.