Customer Reviews

Dynamic HTML Black Book: The Web Professional's Guide to Using and Interacting with Dynamic HTML

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

 

 

The book is said to handle about Dynamic HTML. In general lines it does, but with a lot of words around it. You can summarize the entire book in just 40 usefull pages, the rest is just not interesting, such as complete listings of DHTML-sites, WITHOUT explanation. The entire book handles to much about the history of HTML and HTML in theory. The CDROM should contain several usefull programs, but it's not worth anything either.

The book combines all technologies that sourround web development. It really introduce what is dhtml (not as a proprietary technology) but as a combination of a set of technologies like CSS, DOM, Javascript, etc. From the standards to the production the book also cover animation in dhtml, sound, visual effects and awesome demonstrations.

IT's cool for beginners as encouragement, and perfect for web professionals as the gold resource.

This book is severaly outdated. The material is Netscape 4 and Internet Exploder specific. Nowhere, will users get adequate information about developing DHTML using W3C standards (DOM1, DOM2, CSS1, and CSS2). As Netscape 6, Opera 5, and Internet 5 support these new standards, any web pages developed from this book's material will not work across all browsers, and instead will be glued onto Microsoft or obsoleted versions of Netscape.

The book offers mounds of general information about HTML and HTML technology, but does not offer any code snippets to illustrate the concepts, except for the seldom few places here and there.

Towards the end of the book are dumps of source code. This is an utter waste of precious trees. This material could have just been put on the CD. There are no code walkthroughs of the material, so one wonders if the authors are going for the paid per word/page/etc.

There are those books out there that are full of fluff and are good to stuff a bookshelf in the bookstore, and then there are those books that are a rare gem of enlightenment. This book leans more towards the fluff.

At first I thought that I have bought the best book about DHTML that would launch me to a more advanced use of DHTML. But I was wrong, very wrong. The book is hard to read, the examples are never really explained from line to line and the CD-ROM is worthless. I have spent a lot of money on this book and recieved nothing. I am now thinking of buying a nother book. Although there are some usefull information in it, but not as much as I thought.

I think this book is indicated for web developers. The book includes very technical information of many technologies (IE related and Netscape related). There are many cool examples and source code, Not all are fully explained.