Customer Reviews

Dynamic Html

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I found the book useful as an introduction and tutorial to Cascading Style Sheets and to Netscape's Dynamic HTML. I was able to develop some interesting pages as a result. However, there were several examples that didn't work. This was frustrating and in some cases it meant that I was unable to understand key points. There were also whole sections that repeated from one chapter to another. Possibly the book had been too hurriedly put together. The JavaScript and VBScript reviews were not helpful. The overview of Microsoft's object model and Netscape's object model were instructive in an academic sort of way. However, it would take a deeper book than this one--or considerable experience--to really get a working understanding of these object models. I subscribed to the IDG readers club and found it unhelpful.

The writing was clear and energetic enough to keep me reading. However, the scope was too broad and the broken examples very distracting. I would not consider buying another IDG book (the Dummies parent company) as long as I had an alternative.

The first time I read through the book, I was impressed with the detail given, and found the numerous samples very helpfull. Then I started trying to develop web pages using DHTML. Thats were it all fell apart.

I found that the examples actually fell short of helpfully illustrating the underlying concepts, and it was very difficult to understand the full nature of the Document Object Models.

The book is really three sections, Intro, IE and NN specifics, and cross browser compatability. I did find the sections on JScript and VBScript usefull as a reminder reference, but a better explanation of choosing the correct language would be a lot more usefull.

What about all the other browsers out there?

The cross browser stuff is all very interesting, but again it doesnt actually help to explain the underlying issues, rather it "Sells" the solution that the author has devised.

In summary, A good introduction to the subject, Lots of code samples, Little explanation of the concepts, difficult to use as a reference.

I have since found other references that helped me a lot more. Check out Inside Dynamic HTML by Scott Isaacs.

Well written and well thought out. It assumes a working knowledge of Javascript and VB Script. But it goes deeply into the issues of Cross-browser compatability. Which is a big plus.

For a book that includes a broad range of topics, it covers most of them very well (cross-browser compatibility, microsoft's and netscape's implementations) but the short javascript and vbscript "reviews" are really pointless. If you know the language you know it. If you don't these little tutorials really can't give you a good grasp of either language. Once you get past those hurdles, it is an excellent book with superb DHTML coverage. I recommend it to web builders with a working knowledge of HTML, Javascript and/or VBScript.