Customer Reviews

Dynamic Html Web Magic

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

If I could re-title this book, it would be "How To Go Out Of Your Way To Spend Four Weeks Creating in DHTML What You Could Do In One Day With Flash". That pretty much says it all.

My problem with this book is that it goes against the basic concept of software development that says "use the right tool for the job". And let's get real, the DHTML in this book is NOT the right tool. For example, consider the chapters on image animation. The author spends a huge amount of time and effort to show how to create many different graphics and write many different layers in order to glue them together with complex DHTML so that'll animate as one flying bird. That's great, but what did you really accomplish? The user has to download all of those different graphics, which considerably slows down the page. The page is fatter because of all the layers and DHTML to glue them together. And the page will render slower because the browser has to evaluate all the DHTML, load the images, and load the animation. Instead, why not spend one hour using a graphics program to create one animated GIF that loads quickly with *NO* threat of browser incompatibility. And that's the way this entire book read: I bet I can show you a somewhat-decent way of doing anything that animated GIFs or Flash can do, no matter how complex and unrealistic my implementations may be in the real world. That's great as an experiement or research thesis, but so would a book about how to type on a keyboard using only your nose and one ear. Sure it's possible, but who's going to do that?!?

This book was an absolute waste of my money. I walked away remembering why Flash and animated GIFs exist and how helpful they can be. If you're looking for a book on building Dynamic web pages, I suggest "DHTML For the World Wide Web" or "JavaScript For The World Wide Web".

This is a really poor example of a DHTML resource. Once you oooo and aaaah at the examples, the book is relatively worthless. The author cut and paste the same information about the same JavaScript over and over into every chapter. Save your money.

This is a must-have for any dHTML developer. Even though the book is only 300 pages, it is the most descriptive dynamic html resource yet. If that doesn't convince you to buy the book already, go to www.htmlguru.com and see for yourself what the author, Jeff Rouyer is capable of. The disc included with the book has great images Jeff created on Adobe PhotoShop for you to use on your site. It also has JavaScript source code, and stylesheet files to view. From a 13 year old's perspective, 'Dynamic HTML web magic' rocks!

Some of Rouyer's examples are flashy, if a bit unrealistic in real-world download times (especially since in each instance, the on-line experience would require waiting for all images to preload), but for the price, I expected to get more for my money. Considering that the book is only 296 pages to begin with, the pages consumed in each and EVERY chapter by outlining the SAME coding procedure (first browser detection, then link the stylesheet, then link... and so on, ad nauseum) are a huge waste. The overuse of outlined "tips" which are nearly identical, word for word, in each chapter really started to annoy me after awhile. After leafing through previous pages to verify that the same information was being rehashed again and again, I was disgusted. I suspect that Rouyer could have explained the examples in the book in 10 or so pages, but that would hardly justify the cover price, right? Too bad there isn't a "Cliff Notes" version available.

I would have given this book 0 stars, but I'm forced by the rating system to give it at least 1. If you want to learn DHTML, there are much better sources available. Save your money and pass this one by or wait for the condensed version.

This book presents code for accomplishing 16 tasks using combinations of HTML, style sheets, and JavaScript. All examples and graphics are included on the accompanying CD-ROM (which worked fine on my IBM ThinkPad in Win2000). Yes, the tasks, like flashing text, circular animations, and pop-up menus, are rather cool. But are they really necessary? Will they bring more users to your Webpage? My biggest complaint with the book is that Rouyer repeats 4 out of his 10 or 11 steps for each task verbatim in every single chapter, giving full explanations each time. An additional 3 or 4 steps for each task are basically identical, with only filenames or numbers of calls to files different. This book would be a lot shorter and probably a lot cheaper to produce if these steps weren't repeated so many times. If you like to learn from examples, then this book can give you a lot of ideas. But if it's concepts that you're looking for, it will be up to you to find them on your own with this book.

This book does not deal with reality! High end graphics are way too slow for the Internet. Visiting his site on the net if you are a user with eben a 56K modem, will tell you that the author is off track. Sure, if everyone has T1 lines or Cable modems, ADSL then these techniques could be somewhat useful. But by then 2001-2002 (when 70-85% will have this speed) the bar will be much higher and Microsoft's Chrome will be the standard, not Javascript...or even Flash The Java Script that is provided is not clean and caused some odd behavoir. Pass on this one and wait till Dec or Jan 98 when some new and usefull Flash 3 books will be out.

The book does have a lot of great examples, but that's it. Just examples. It shows you what the author created, and then how he did it. It is not very practical for creating your own DHTML scripts. If you try to create something that he specifically didn't do, you're lost with this book. Definitely not a reference book. I just glanced through this thing then stuck it in my desk and haven't touched it since. Graphics are pretty cool though..

I pointed my browswer at the website for the examples in the book and was shocked to find the following message:

"Currently this site uses DHTML as implemented in
Netscape 4.x and Explorer 4/5.x under the Windows platform ..."

Folks, this is the antithesis of what web designers should be doing.

This book is visually enhanced with lots of full-color screen shots and color that separates the code samples from the text. This book focuses primarily on animation and dynamic menus, while there is more to Dynamic HTML. Much of the animation can be accomplished in Flash, but this is a good alternative to paying for expensive software and relying on the end-user to have the appropriate plug-in. This book is one of the few that I originally found to be cross-browser compatible and is very useful and well-documented for the animations and menus. The visual screen shots make it easy to flip through and find what you are looking for ... as long as it's in the book.

I liked the book because you did not need to be an advanced programmer to use it. Everything was step by step and easy to follow. My only problem with the book were the occasional errors in the scripts. In a way this helped me because it made me problem solve myself.