Building Browser Extensions: Create Modern Extensions for Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Edge

Before purchasing this book, you should have a good grasp of JavaScript as well as knowledge of HTML and CSS. I would not recommend this book otherwise, because it would take significantly more time to learn from and you may not retain or learn as much as you could.

From what little I knew of browser extension development beforehand, I feel confident in saying that this book will jump-start your development efforts and position you for success. Though the book is partially a guide for learning extension development, it quickly devolves into more of a reference manual which may eventually be discarded in favour of web searches or MDN documentation.

My main gripes with this book are as follows:

• The text is too large and causes code examples to be separated into multiple pages, which made it a tad more difficult to read. This happens in many books, but it could have easily been mitigated with a smaller font size.
• Bold text is overused. This may be a personal issue, but it does make it more difficult for me to separate sections of the text and I often found my eyes skipping ahead to see what the next piece of bolded information was.
• Following my first point, the overall layout of text, code examples, and images felt muddled. You might read a paragraph, see two or three pages of examples, and then the continuing text. I do not have a perfect answer for how to fix this, but maybe the code and examples could be pushed to the end of each chapter and the text itself could include references to the sections or page numbers of where to find the code.

Overall, I would recommend this book to someone who is just starting to learn browser extension development, but I would caution them with the above points and further recommend that they have a project to work on while they read through the book.