Modern JavaScript Larry Ullman

I wanted to do a quick review on Larry Ullmans book "Modern JavaScript - Develop and Design".

I came by Larry Ullman purely on chance. I watch Eli The Computer Guy on YouTube pretty regularly. Eli's advice is pretty solid, as a business professional, I can tell what he is saying is from years of experience working in a variety of fields/companies/places. So a lot of his advice I don't mind listening too, even actioning on.
Eli has talked about what he calls "The Bunny Books" several times.

When I was ready to start a new language on my own after college, it just happened to work out that it was going to be PHP. Naturally I went after a bunny book. By chance, the bunny book happened to by Larry Ullman.

I like Larry's reasoning, flow, and overall examples in how he writes his books. I looked at other books when I had finished his PHP book, and there was always something that turned me away from it, either the book was boring, examples poorly explained, something was always off. I went back to Ullman and bought his Advanced PHP book, and his JavaScript book.

So to the good part...

Modern JavaScript - Develop and Design by Larry Ullman.

Overall I would give the book an 8/10. However with that being said, I would also only recommend it for someone who understands programming/setup a little. He gives how tos for setup but they feel lack luster in my opinion.

However, once your going and rolling the book focuses heavily on vanilla...or plain javascript. You don't get introduced to other libraries such as Ajax and JQUERY until 10-12 chapters into the book. I wanted to know the gooey core of the language, not the language after it had been rolled around in the dirt and no longer looked quite like the same. Ok maybe a harsh analogy, nothing against Ajax or JQuery...quite the opposite in fact, I genuinely enjoy both libraries. I could write an Ajax post all on its on....updating stuff on pages asynchronously....what! Awesome!
Anyways in the respect of going after the gooey center, this book was perfect for that and I enjoyed learning vanilla immensely.

He also starts out giving you all of the html you need to pair with the javascript. He very quickly fades this out, and goes to the absolutely needed things such as <div> blocks containing links or forms, as needed for the javascript to work. At times I found this frustrating, and other times refreshing. It forced me to practice thinking about what the programing is doing or trying to accomplish.

If I had any suggestion for the book, it would be inlaid pictures of what the program should look like and accomplish. There were some good parts, and other parts that I could of used even a picture or outline to help me work through it.

Overall I definitely recommend this to someone who is in an early level of skill interested in JavaScript, but also has basic concept of understanding how/what Object Oriented Programming is.

I also highly recommend Larry Ullman as a technical book writer.