Customer Reviews

Dynamic HTML: The HTML Developer's Guide

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

After seeing all the five star reviews I thought this must be the book I needed - how wrong I was. I'm a seasoned web developer needing a really chunky tutorial on DHTML, and this book ain't it. Jeff kicks off with a general intro to CSS and the DOM - ok but not brilliant, better info exist on the web. Then things go downhill. All his DHTML applications are mundane at best (image rollovers, weedy pull downs) or downright obscure at worst (MS channels). Code is NOT explained line by line and you are not left with the feeling you can do it yourself. As long as you want to add Jeff's example into your pages then you're golden, if you want to learn the underlying principles and then develop your own stuff...forget it! And despite the blurb it ain't cross platform, its two scripts and some detect. Shame on you.

I cannot speak too highly of this book, nor of its accompanying Web Site. I run my own Web Site and, although an amateur, I found HTML and JavaScript reasonably manageable. I confess, however, that I baulked at moving on to DHTML for 4- and 5-level Browsers. It all seemed just too daunting - until I discovered Jeff Rule's excellent 'Dynamic HTML'.

The book is beautifully presented and written, and, unlike so many computer and internet textbooks, avoids jargon and that ever-so irritating teenage juvenile style! Moreover, I found it all accessible, and the concepts are built up slowly and sensibly. A key feature is the careful dissection of the Scripts as you move along.

The book is absolutely superb on cross-browser and platform problems between Netscape and Internet Explorer (which are too often ignored by Web Masters) and this make the Scripting highly practical. I also found the Scripts to be of genuine value and not just 'nerdy' inventions, especially those dealing with animations, drag and drop, transitions, filters, and menus.

The publishers are also to be congratulated on producing a clean, unfussy, adult text, with a simple use of bold and tables. There is a helpful Glossary and two final Chapters on 'The Future' and 'Dynamic HTML Authoring Tools', such as 'Dreamweaver'.

All in all, therefore, a model text. The supporting Web Site is just as helpful and is likewise highly recommended. And it all works! Not an Alert anywhere!

Thanks to Mr. Rule for a book which genuinely helps the amateur Web Page designer, but doesn't insult her/his intelligence.

Philip Stott, London, UK

This book contains a wealth of great examples from animations, pull down menus and drag and drop. These examples can be dropped right in your web page or you can use them as a basis to build bigger and better examples. This is NOT a comprehensive reference book, but then I didn't want a dictionary I wanted a "How to book". The site has tons more examples than those listed in the book.. All the book examples worked though a couple of the extras were broken.

This book is a how-to-do-it manual of DHTML. The preface and first 2 chapters give some very interesting background into what DHTML is, how it was developed, and why developers have to work so hard to make pages cross-browser compatible. Subsequent chapters discuss mouseovers, transitions, resizing graphics, pull-down menus, drag-and-drop, animations, and sequencing. The author assumes that the user has a basic knowledge of the components of DHTML: HTML, cascading style sheets, and JavaScript. He gives the complete HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code for each example, together with a brief description of how each chunk of the code fits together. Users who are not familiar with all the components of DHTML may find the descriptions too terse to follow.

Unlike many Web designers who assume they can dictate to their users what browser and platform they must use, Rule has had to go out of his way in his work for the Discovery Channel to make his designs work on all conceivable browsers. For this reason, he devotes a great deal of energy to explaining differences between browsers and how to make each task work on different browsers. The usual structure for each chapter is first a brief introduction to the task (such as animations), a description of what the task does, technical limits, underlying technology, and finally examples. The examples section always includes separate sections for how to make the design work in Internet Explorer, in Netscape, and cross-platform.

The actual example scripts are not as clear as they could be. They are all presented in courier-bold with line numbers and no indentation. Although this certainly makes them easy to distinguish, they can be rather fatiguing to read.

One very useful feature of the book is its glossary, where technical terms such as "object detection" or "sprite control" are defined in clear language. The book has also a companion Website where sample code can be downloaded.

having already posted, the further i get in this book, the more angry i become. if you're gonna write a book in which your readers will have to rely on your web site to get through, it helps to keep the site functioning. if there was an option i would give this book a zero. the web site is so bad. check this out: the page i went to get an example of a mouseover goes to a menu page with buttons leading to different areas of the site having nothing to do with dhtml. even worse, the buttons themselves lead to a different page than intended. example: a link that's supposed to go to the page outlining his company's vision instead goes to a review page about html books. this is just one example. the whole site appears to have been handed over to an inexperienced intern to maintain. i should have known better than to take the easy way. i should have gone with one of the larger and more informative books from a reliable publisher. this book is a waste of my time. it's going in the dumpster. i have no idea why everyone else is cheering.

this is an excellent book for web developers or producers who know little about programming. Hence, the name "The Html Developer's Guide". This book is written for people who know HTML in their sleep, but want to add some pizazz to their static web site. It has examples that you can plug right into your web page. Jeff clearly explains what each line of code is doing and how to integrate it into your HTML.

Even though this book is easy to understand and read, a programming guru will find it useful as well. It has useful javascripts that anyone could use on their site.

I highly recommend this book to people who are good html coders, but want their site to do more.

I found this book to be a useful tool, which I think is the highest praise you can offer for a programming book. The book is not a DHTML reference but instead focuses on how to do specific things which is just what I like as a programmer. The chapters are cleanly organized into specific topics and techniques with good, cut and paste, source code. Jeff Rule clearly explains the sample source code and highlights the important pieces that make it work. He also does an excellent job with cross-platform issues by showing the reader how to implement these techniques in Explorer and Netscape. The only negative I have is not having a CD of the source code in the book but instead having to look on his web site. The web site is nice but not easy to access from home with one telephone line. A CD would have been much easier. In addition, the site makes extensive use of transitions which are extremely annoying and have no purpose other than to showcase the author's ability and make pages appear slower. All in all though, a good book.

I undertook the task of teaching myself dHTML as part of my senior thesis project. This book was a great resource to have as I was wading through and figuring out code. It's simple but complete, and it doesn't dumb anything down. Oh, and I got an 'A' on my thesis.

This is a wonderful book. It is written by the web master who maintains Discovery.com, the Discovery Channel's website. Rather than present thousands of listings for tags and elements, the author steps the reader through a series of exercises which employ real-world examples of handy techniques. These include useful mouse response issues, pop-up/pull-down menus, time sequencing (invoking events at determined intervals), animation, and ActiveX/Java objects usage. These techniques are designed with real-time consideration in mind, and are neither CPU nor bandwidth intensive. By the time you've read this book, you have a nice set of tools which can be combined to enhance your web site while keeping response/load time at a reasonable levels. The author also deals effectively with cross browser considerations. I highly recommend this book as an intro to DHTML.

As a web designer with average jscript/javascript/css abilities I found this book pretty helpful with it's easy to read style and practical examples. What baffles me though is it's lack of proper explanations. It reads like it's been rush released like just about everything else in this industry. Do you think that the authors/publishers actually tried the book out on someone who'd be using it? Probably not! If you have the time and ability to "fill in the gaps" then this is a good set of exercises, if not then prepare for a confusing time.