Animatronics or Javascript

Animatronics: Guide to Holiday Displays

Author: Edwin Wis

Electronic hobbyists take note! Author Edwin Wise has written the perfect book to help you liven up the holidays! This hands-on and project-oriented book on animated holiday displays covers simple, classic projects and advanced motion animation used in professional mechatronic systems. Along the way, it includes tips and tricks for sculpting and decorating all your self-operated mechanisms.

While other books on the market describe only static displays, none provide the advanced hobbyist with the tools needed to create a complex animated display. Animatronics: A Guide to Animated Holiday Displays is targeted at the intermediate and advanced builder and covers four broad categories:

• Electrical animations
• Pneumatic animations
• Servo animations
• Control systems

Also covered are "background" projects that include stationary systems such as Fog Chillers and how to make water glow under black light. Animatronics guides you through projects to build and control AC motors and pneumatic systems inside your animated props. It also includes some overlap with Wise's previous book, Applied Robotics, dealing with the sensor and MCU control projects.

See also: Daily Bread or Chuck Wagon Cookbook

JavaScript

Author: Don Gosselin

JavaScript, Fourth Edition is designed as a guide for beginning programmers to develop Web applications using the JavaScript programming language. It introduces a variety of techniques, focusing on what students need to know to start adding JavaScript to their Web pages. In each chapter, students perform tasks that focus on a particular technique required for building and creating JavaScript programs. The examples and exercises in this book will help students learn the basics of how to use JavaScript with well-formed Web pages, including how to manipulate the browser object model, validate forms, use object-oriented techniques, and learn how to trace and resolve errors in JavaScript programs, to name a few. Advanced topics include how to manage state information, use the Dynamic Object Model (DOM), create Dynamic HTML (DHTML), update Web pages with AJAX, and create server-side scripts.