Taking Your Talent to the Web

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Hopefully, Microsoft, Netscape, and Opera will soon patch the holes in their ECMAScript and DOM support, and Macromedia and Adobe will vastly improve their support for these standards in Dreamweaver and Golive, respectively. If both things happen, you might be able to spend the rest of your life banging out advanced JavaScript functions with no clue as to what you are doing or why it works.

If you intend to work primarily as a graphic designer and merely wish to create simple sites for your existing clients, you can probably get by with cutting and pasting or relying on Dreamweaver or Golive—at least for the time being.

But if you intend to plunge into full-time web design or if you simply want to master the craft, you will want to learn JavaScript. So let us tell you how you can do that, and then we’ll move on to examine how JavaScript helps web designers solve typical problems that arise in the development of any professional site.

EDUCATING RITA ABOUT JAVASCRIPT

We’ve called JavaScript a relatively “easy-to-learn” programming language, but it is a programming language, and teaching it is beyond the scope of this book. In some ways, teaching it is beyond the scope of fat books dedicated entirely to that pursuit. However, we can recommend two books on the subject:

■Nick Heinle’s Designing With JavaScript: Creating Dynamic Web Pages (O’Reilly: 1997) is a wonderful, readable, detailed introduction that any designer can understand and is chock-full of examples and explanations of the basic terminology and theory behind JavaScript. The book is somewhat out of date (at least as of this writing), but it will raise your comfort level tremendously while teaching you the basics.