Customer Reviews

Dynamic Html: A Primer

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I thought I could, at least, learn something from the book. After reading through the book, I found it messy. And my choice then is to buy another...

As a web developer I bought this book hoping to learn new techniques. What I got was frustration. Although this book contains numerous coding examples (mainly for use with Internet Explorer), only about 5% of them work (with Internet Explorer). Don't waste your money.

I got this book because I wanted a good introductory course to DHTML. I knew little about style sheets and my scripting skills were not too great; and this book basically assumes that you know it all. It doesn't give any good examples and it's poorly laid out with useless sample code. This book should have been in color with a CD-ROM included, and it should have gone more into depth with style sheets and scripting. In a nutshell, don't buy this book. It stinks.

When I bought this book I was looking for something I could read away from the computer and still pick up the basics of the new dynamic HTML possibilities. I got what I was looking for. The book is easy to read and understand and I was satisfied. . .until I got around to actually sitting down and hacking out the code. The book is, frankly, out of date. Written before the final release of IE4.0, it misrepresents some of the methods and code available for Microsoft's latest browser. I can only assume that the support for some of the code was changed after publication of this book. In fact, a lot of what I learned turned out to be fairly useless. As if to verify this, I soon found that there were many updates to chapters on the publisher's website. All in all, it's a book with great potential. I would expect a new edition out soon - and when it comes it could prove to be a truly excellent introduction to DHTML.

I think this book was valuable when I was just learning about DHTML. Reading it is like learning about what is possible, but you can't learn everything about DHTML. The author really just provides examples of what you can do, but he won't show you everything. Keep in mind that this book was published back when the then current version if Internet Explorer was (I thought) the best implementation of DHTML, albeit non-standard. And that's the rub; the techniques the author demonstrates are browser-specific and won't work universally, not even today. Finally, the book seems disorganized, and it is difficult to find what few useful examples there are.