JavaScript is the free language built into all modern browsers including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera and Chrome. It is the power behind dynamic HTML and the Ajax environment used for Web 2.0 websites such as Facebook, Flickr, Gmail and many others. Plug-in JavaScript is aimed squarely at people who have learned basic HTML (and perhaps a little CSS) but are interested in doing more. For example, they may wish to create more dynamic menu systems, provide mouse hover effects, support Ajax functionality and more. Using Plug-in JavaScript they will be shown how to do all these things and much more using very simple JavaScript.

It is never assumed that you know anything about a solution, and you are taken through each example step by step with the explanations included so there is no need to look up anything elsewhere. Every solution is complete and applicable immediately. Where possible the book purposefully ignores more advanced JavaScript techniques such as object oriented programming (even though they may sometimes be more powerful) so that you can understand every single plug-in.

Robin Nixon is a computer journalist who has also developed numerous websites using PHP, MySQL and JavaScript. He has written over 500 articles and authored several books on computing. You may also be interested in Robin's other book on JavaScript, Learning PHP, MySQL & JavaScript. Robin is also the author of Ubuntu: Up and Running and Plug-in PHP.