Customer Reviews

Dynamic Web Publishing Unleashed, Second Edition (2nd Edition)

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

 

 

Book suffers from the "lets try to cover it all in one book" syndrome. So you get too much of too little plus a lot of good space is wasted discussing things nobody uses. Lack of the ability to cut in the copyediting room. Great for an overview of major web development tools. Not great on getting a practical overall picture of what works and what does not with each tool. You could easily waste time using the wrong stuff.

I was looking for a book to help me sort through which web technologies I should use (Active Server Pages, Java servlets, CGI, client vs server-side coding, scripting vs compiled code, etc.) in designing an online resource for my employer's web site. This book assumes some technical background to be easily readable. It is definitely an overview of the available technologies (not an in depth tutorial, although it does give a good sense of what it takes to work with each technology). I found it to be EXTREMELY helpful in explaining how the different web technologies relate and for getting a bird's eye view of how to work with each technology. This book was exactly what I needed to help me make an informed decision of which web technologies were right for the job I was faced with. After skimming the appropriate sections, I was ready to start planning the development work ahead of me. Before this book I was wondering whether there was some technology that I might be missing or whether I was indeed choosing the right method for what I had to do.

Although this book is a decent overview of various topics, I don't like the book overall. I would be very frightened to find my pages looking like hers and I would refuse to look at sites like the pages represented here unless they provided life saving information. Her sense of using CSS1 style sheets seems to be to make the pages look much, much worse than those written with tables. Also, she chooses to show what style sheets can add to a page made with tables by trying to make the tables look very simplistic. Had she invested the same amount of coding in the tables examples as she did in the style sheets examples, the results would be far less distinctive and the results would actually work on all browsers instead of sporadically even with newer browsers. For instance including one image in a table example and then having a dozen in the style sheets - which has more potential to look good? This book, I've found, isn't even a particularly good reference. With the simple investment of a few icons she could have made information such as whether a tag is deprecated, or what version of HTML the code was introduced in or what browser versions the tags work with more quickly and easily known. It may be an okay reference, but it is my no means quick or complete. I bought this book for $15 and am barely happy with it at that price.

I am a beginner in programming HTML and JavaScript, but not in computer science at all. So for me it was important to find a book which covers all - HTML, Java, JavaScript, CGI, StyleSheets, but not on a level which tell me, what a computer is or whow to write programs. So I am very happy with this book, although I am missing some "in depth information" in some chapters.

GOOD book. Loads of information. It assumes prior knowledge of some of the Technologies but a good place to CONTINUE from a beginners book (NOT A STARTER BOOK BY ALL MEANS!) Particularly useful for new technologies eg ActiveX and XML. Good buy second book.

The book was one of my favorites for information on HTML but I found it quite confusing when comes to CSS. The things should have been better explained. Not having a CD is a serious minus - I spend more than an hour to find and download the source for the book (MCM constantly changing sites). I would recommend the book as a decent reference and way beyond "Dynamic Web Programming"