Customer Reviews

The Comprehensive Guide to VBScript: The Encyclopedic Reference for VBScript, HTML & ActiveX

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4 star:		(1)
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2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The book is pretty much okay except that it lacks an index. This makes using it as a reference sometimes difficult. If you know exactly what things are called you can look them up in the alphabetical listing. Otherwise, you are kind of screwed.

I thought the above critic was being a bit too harsh on an author... until I read it myself. Although in the "Who needs this Book?" section it mentions that "...this book can assist anyone from the beginner to the accomplished professional programmer.", I have to disagree and say that a new beginner may be confused by many of the inaccurate and dated statements. For example, I love the one that says (paraphrasing) you shouldn't use the !DOCTYPE statement because only HTML 3.2 browsers can read it anyway. Why would you ever commit such a line to print?? In many cases, this book was outdated before it went to press. It really became a problem after reading completely inaccurate statements, then not knowing weather following statements were accurate or not.

On the plus side, I liked the way it was indexed. It offered a good reference resource to those that couldn't quite remember the exact syntax, but already knew what the functions did. I noticed that the "Comprehensive Guide to VBScript" might have been comprehensive THEN, but it's missing a lot TODAY.

I could have probably got the same info online somewhere though, but I always like to have a hard copy handy. This one, however, made me feel like even I could be an author of a VBscript book. And that's not saying much.

True some of the wording in the book is a little off, but the Syntax and the depth of explaination regaurding the tags is invalueable. I have yet to find another reference book that explains the syntaxes and how to use them more complete than in this book. I use it as a reference to HTML 3.2 and ActiveX controls constantly

*Could* make a pretty handy dictionary, *if* you can ignore the irritating, inaccurate, and uneducated claims and editorials (mostly found in the introduction/tutorial) all based on the premise that HTML is a programming language.
Examples:
page xxiii: "What in HTML is called a 'tag' is called a 'structure' or 'function' in other languages."--WRONG. HTML tags are simply *tokens* which the browser *parses* to determine the output.
page xxvii: "No other computer programming language comes close to HTML's forgiveness. Try submitting [a text document containing only the string] 'A Simple Page' to Basic, Pascal, C, or any other language. None of them will simply display the words. All of them will choke and throw out an error message."--WRONG!! First, there's no such thing as submitting anything to a language. You *can* 'submit' input to a *program* written in a programming language- such as an internet browser- and if that program is *designed* to handle that input, it *will* simply display the words. Otherwise, if the program is *not designed* to handle the input, it *will* choke and spit out an error message.

It is irritating to have spent money on a developer's reference, written by someone who clearly does not have a grasp of programming *basics*.