Customer Reviews

Dynamic HTML in Action (Microsoft)

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is the best book I've seen for learning DHTML. I taught for years and the author has a gift for explaining both simple and complex ideas in a very readable but information-rich format.
Like a reviewer below, I also found the book to be full of tons of links to useful online references and the CD to have a lot of useful info/demos.
As far as the book's coverage of different browsers, I thought that it covered the most important issues-what does not work in different browsers. There are even a few places where it deals with Opera and things like spiders and text only browsers, though of course most of the coverage is of Netscape and Internet Explorer.

True, this is not a great reference, though the CD contains great reference material and there are www links scattered liberally throughout the text. For more general DHTML references one would do better with either Goodman's "Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Guide" (O'Reilly & Assoc., 1998) for a cross-platform perspective or Francis et al. "IE5 DHTML Prog. Ref. 2nd Ed." (Wrox Press, 1999) for a very IE5-centric text.

What this book excels at is showing you how to do stuff with DHTML, combining (Java)script-ing, CSS, and touching on XML. It doesn't go deeply into any particular subject, nor does it skim too lightly, and its "portal" approach almost guarantees there are links to more information.

Netscape-centric developers will find this text off-putting to offensive. This book stresses - though is not exclusive to - IE4 and 5. As Microsoft and Netscape converge on the W3C DHTML specification we can hope browser-specific DHTML books will be replaced by more standardized texts.

I would recommend this book to anyone who is at least slightly familiar with the technologies and wants to put them together quickly to create eye-catching sites. Its Javascript tutorial is weak - if you're not already familiar with Javascript or its siblings (JScript, ECMAScript) start elsewhere then return to this book for practical uses of Javascript.

The best audience for this book is probably a beginner or intermediate web developer. It does a great job of TEACHING. It isn't a reference-it's only 500 pages and a reference that just covers scripting (which won't teach you anything) will fill well over that. It gives very good coverage of HTML and good scripting and css sections (it has two screenshots showing how all the text related css attributes are rendered in Internet Explorer and Netscape).

The latter part of the book is devoted to a lot of Internet Explorer specific technologies that could be of use a lot of use to people developing intranet sites.

This book details many features that work in Internet Explorer and not in the latest Netscape product. HOWEVER, that is to be expected since Netscape has not released a new browser in several years. The advantage of this book is that it doesn't present the user with a just one feature set-it lets the reader know what things work and what don't in each browser, although there is a focus on the Microsoft product. In some cases it even details how the Mozilla betas differ from the released Netscape browser and it mentions Opera a couple of times.

This book assumes that you have never programmed before and never heard of DHTML. With this assumption in mind, it waste the first half of the book with very, very basic (basic!) material. However, if you are the total novice, this is a well written book for you with a slant toward Microsoft Technology. If you are an intermediate scripter, you won't learn much at all.

This edition provides way better coverage of working cross-browser. It looks like the authors put a lot of thought into creating samples that worked in both browsers wherever possible, and told us why when a sample didn't. I thought that the writing was excellent and very accessible, both to novices and more advanced programmers. It includes lots of sample code (on the cd along with some tools and extensive references). This book has a lot more information than the first edition. It also includes a bunch of new IE5-specific stuff, like behaviors. All in all, a great book to learn DHTML.

The simple fact is: Internet Explorer 4.0 and later now owns more than 80% of the browser market. Because of this, the books focus on the browser is not necessarily a bad thing. Plus, it's a Microsoft book - anyone who buys it thinking it will cater completely to Netscape Navigator is fooling themself.

Eitherway, this book is amazing for people wanting to begin their quest on learning DHTML. Though I have been professionally designing web pages for years, I have been forced to focus on ASP driven pages or static HTML pages. JavaScript has consistently alluded my understanding. VBScript was easy. JavaScript has never made much sense and I have lost interest in learning it, book after book.

However, this book teaches you unbelievably well. I was literally JOYED to see the way that this book was explaining things to me, ONE event, one action, one attribute at a time. It was so refreshing to have things slowly doled out to you rather than be tossed in over your head, gasping for air.

If you don't know much about JavaScript/DHTML and are interested in learning - this is your book. Pick it up immediately. Yes, it's older, but the foundation it gives you is wonderful.

Very well written. The writer has a knack of making some complex topics easy to understand. I've found some of the samples really useful, like the expanding menu code and the cookie reading/writing code (that works back in IE3, unlike most of the other code I tried). Excellent conceptual coverage of javascript. Really good coverage of HTML and CSS too. I have not used some of the cool stuff he talks about later in the book (like behaviors and the media controls) because I have to make most of my code work in really old browsers. The section on browser detection has been useful.

This is the best book for learning HTML that I have found. Leave it to Microsoft to let it go out of print and replace it with crappy titles that mainly shill for Microsoft products.

This book did really well at covering how to use all the different parts of Dynamic HTML together. Even though I already knew HTML and JavaScript, the sections on these actually taught me some stuff I did not know.

I also thought that it was very well written and helpful, especially the parts on JavaScript and CSS and how to use them together.

Some of the sections in the second half of the book cover really cool technologies, like filters and XML.

I found the references included on the CD VERY helpful.

This is a very good book that covers everything from CCS, Javascript, Dynamic Objects, and much much more. The only bad thing is that it is too short, I read this book in a week. It left me asking for more. I think they should expand this book.