Chapter 1 talks briefly about the history, present, and future of JavaScript, and then moves on to explore the basics of object-oriented programming (OOP) in general. You then learn how to set up your training environment (Firebug) in order to dive into the language on your own, using the book examples as a base.

Chapter 2 discuses the language basics: variables, data types, arrays, loops, and conditionals.

Chapter 3 covers functions. JavaScript has many uses for functions and here you learn to master them all. You also learn about the scope of variables and JavaScript's built-in functions. An interesting, but often misunderstood feature of the language—closures—is demystified at the end of the chapter.

Chapter 4 introduces objects: how to work with properties and methods, and the various ways to create your objects. There's also an overview of the built-in objects in JavaScript, such as Math and Date (just an overview, Appendix C has all the details).

Chapter 5 is dedicated to the all-important concept of prototypes in JavaScript.

Chapter 6 expands your "thinking in JavaScript" horizon, discussing a dozen ways to implement inheritance in JavaScript.

Chapter 7 is the browser chapter. In this chapter, you learn about BOM (Browser Object Model), DOM (W3C's Document Object Model), browser events, and AJAX.

Chapter 8 dives into various unique JavaScript coding patterns, as well as several language-independent design patterns, translated to JavaScript from the Book of Four, the most influential work of software design patterns.

Appendix A lists the reserved words in JavaScript.

Appendix B is a reference to the built-in JavaScript functions, together with sample uses.

Appendix C is a reference that provides detail and provides examples of the use of every method and property of every built-in object in JavaScript.

Appendix D is a regular expressions pattern reference.

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text are shown as follows: " The key/value pairs are divided by colons, in the format key: value ."

A block of code will be set as follows:

var book = {
  name: 'Catch-22',
  published: 1961,
  author: {
    firstname: 'Joseph',
    lastname: 'Heller'
  }
};

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items will be shown in bold:

function TwoDShape(){}
// take care of inheritance
TwoDShape.prototype = Shape.prototype;
TwoDShape.prototype.constructor = TwoDShape;

New terms and important words are introduced in a bold-type font. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in our text like this: "clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen".

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