FAQ

What's the differences between the regular editions?

The 2nd Edition was 195 pages, the 3rd Edition was 304 pages, the 4th Edition was 430 pages, and the 5th Edition is 498 pages, so we've added a significant amount of new material in every new edition.

New chapters introduced in the 4th Edition included Chapter 7, Forms and Regular Expressions; Chapter 13, User Interface Design with JavaScript; Chapter 14, Applied JavaScript; and Chapter 15, Bookmarklets. In the 5th Edition, we reorganized some chapters, added an entirely new chapter, Manipulating Nodes, and added new tasks to many different chapters. Other changes in the 5th Edition involved heavily modifying all the scripts to work with the current browsers and current Web standards (they are now XHTML compliant), and to improve the explanation of issues compared to the previous editions.

We also incorporated many of the excellent suggestions we got from the readers of the previous editions, to whom we are indebted. We're especially happy with one big change that appeard in the 4th Edition and remains in the 5th Edition; in the reference section in the back of the book, the Object Flowchart and the Object Table are now printed in glorious color, making it lots easier to see which objects work in which browsers.

What's the Student Edition? What are the differences between it and the regular edition?

The Student Edition is a special edition of the 5th Edition that includes everything in that edition, plus exercises and review materials for each chapter. We did it at Peachpit's request, because the book is in such widespread use in colleges and universities. Each chapter contains the following:

• Learning Objectives
• Get Up and Running Exercises
• Class Discussion Questions
• Review Questions

We created the Student Edition to make it even easier for instructors to teach JavaScript, and for students to learn it.

Your errata page and FAQ page say that your book is 498 pages long, but my copy's only 494 pages. What's up with that?

You have the Student Edition, which for reasons known only to layout artists is 4 pages shorter, but contains all the same info (plus the exercises and review quesions). The errata on page 498 of the 5th Edition was fixed in the Student Edition, otherwise, the two are identical up to page 478.

Will you have a big downloadable file on your site that contains all the examples in the book?

Yes. You'll find it on the Scripts page of this site. Of course, you can still copy and paste individual scripts.

That file seems to be missing some scripts. Where are they?

There are three cases where we haven't made scripts available for download:

• Straight HTML files, which are referenced in the book and by other scripts, but where the contents aren't given in the book. These are all just normal vanilla HTML files, and can be linked to any files that you have already.
• Scripts from Chapter 19 aren't included, because these are created with visual tools. If you have the visual tools, you can follow the directions to create those same files. If you don't have the tools, you can use other scripts in the book to create these same effects.
• Scripts from Chapter 20 aren't included, because, well, as that's the debugging chapter, they're all full of bugs! Honestly, we couldn't imagine why anyone would want these; go create your own buggy JavaScript files!

I have a JavaScript question that has nothing to do with your book. Are you available for consulting?

Between teaching and working on our next books, we're not taking on any consulting projects at this time. Thanks for asking, though.

I'm a student in a class that uses your book as a textbook. Will you help me with my homework?

No. If we did, we would never have time to write our next books. And you wouldn't learn as much.

I didn't buy your JavaScript book, I bought someone else's instead. Can I ask you a question about the one that I bought?

Sorry, no. Go talk to the author of the other book.

I'm just learning HTML. Can you help me with my pages?

Again, we can't, because we get so much mail that we would never get new work done. We can recommend a really good HTML book, though; it's HTML for the World Wide Web with XHTML and CSS: Visual QuickStart Guide, Fifth Edition, by our friend Elizabeth Castro. Clicking that link and buying that book from Amazon makes both us and Liz happy. Special note for the cat fancier: our cat Pixel is prominently featured on Page 119.

Well, can't I ask you guys anything?

Sure you can. We just can't promise to answer individual questions, because of the time it takes. We will put frequently asked questions (and their answers!) here on this page as they come in.

How should I get in touch with you?

Use the email address found in the book at the end of the Introduction. We read all mail sent to that address, though we can't guarantee a personal reply to every message. We regret that because of the large volume of email that we get, we cannot answer email about the book sent to our personal email addresses.

I have a question about your book. Can I send you my script files?

Not in this world of viruses being spread with email attachments. We've already been sent viruses by accident (or at least, they said it was an accident); we don't want any more. So we never open any files sent to us by people we don't know. Instead, you should post your pages on the Web, then send us the URL so we can take a look at the problem. We trust you, of course; it's the other guys that made us come up with this rule.

If I can't send you a file, can I just include the script as text in email?

Most of the questions we get have to do with image manipulation: rollovers, banners, etc. It's difficult to debug scripts that involve images without having the images available, as quite often, the problem has to do with the way the images are referenced (e.g., directory structure issues, proper capitalization issues). So again, please, send us a URL of the problem page, and we'll be happy to take a look at it.

I'm using Adobe GoLive/Microsoft Front Page/Macromedia Dreamweaver—can you help me with a JavaScript question?

If you use the code from our book, we're happy to help you. However, if you use the code from our book and ask Macromedia or Adobe for help, they'll require you to start using their products first.

We have to ask the same thing. If you have a problem with an Adobe product, please contact Adobe. If you have a problem with a Macromedia product, please contact Macromedia. And if you have a problem with our code, please contact us. But the two of us can't afford to give multi-million dollar software companies free support for their products.

You also might consider purchasing one of these books: GoLive 6 VQS, Real World Adobe GoLive 6, Dreamweaver MX VQS, or Dreamweaver MX Bible.

I can get Scripts 6.5-6.8 to work in Netscape, but not in IE. When will you have a new version of the script?

Actually, those scripts work just fine in IE... when they're put on the web. There's a problem in IE where they don't work when run from your local hard drive. And unfortunately, that's an IE bug, and not one that we can fix. Given, though, that once you upload it to your site they all work fine, it hasn't actually inconvenienced anyone.

Your book mentions "someAction.cgi" and "gotoLocation.cgi" in the Chapter 8 and Chapter 9 scripts. Where are these located?

Those are just example names for CGIs--it's literally "some action"; any action that you want it to be. We don't actually have any CGIs, as they're not required to test or use the JavaScript scripts in that chapter. If you want to learn to write CGI's, we recommend Elizabeth Castro's book Perl and CGI for the World Wide Web: Visual QuickStart Guide, 2nd edition.

How do I run the scripts in Chapter 18?

The scripts in Chapter 18 are not standalone scripts; they are bookmarklets. If you go to the Scripts page, you can drag each script by clicking and dragging on its name to either the personal toolbar or Favorites bar in your browser.