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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good book with a few warts, November 5, 2001
This review is from: Early Adopter Curl (Paperback)
Curl is an important new client-side web language that permits you to create web applications that have the same rich interactive power of local applications (Word, Excel) while reducing the complexity that arises from using multiple existing web languages. This is currently the BEST Curl book on the market. Ok, it's currently the ONLY Curl book on the market, which makes it Good News/Bad News. Good News: This book does a great job of providing Curl information and "how to" examples in more depth than the Curl manuals. All the major topics are covered, which makes this a good overall reference book. The graphics architecture section is particularly helpful, where the authors describe the overall graphics framework of Curl. This info would save any new user time when learning Curl. Bad News: by targeting the early adopter, the book is timely, but shows some warts. Some sections still show and describe the last beta version of Curl. The last beta was mostly similar to the current version of Curl, but the small differences are occasionally distracting. The book also has a number of typos and the class descriptions in one table were copied directly from the (free) Curl manual. As most of the authors are from Curl Corporation, this is not plagiarism, but it is not new information either. Overall, this book serves its purpose by being the first overall book on Curl. The book itself is a great way to learn Curl in conjunction with the Curl manuals. Despite its warts, it is well worth owning. [Bruce Mount worked as one of the Technical Reviewers for this book. No, he didn't review the section with typos. :-)]
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4.0 out of 5 stars
A must for getting up to speed with Curl technology, October 31, 2001
This review is from: Early Adopter Curl (Paperback)
. "EA Curl" will help you get up to speed quickly with advanced online applications that will blow Java right out of the water! Curl technology has the potential of becoming the future of the web, and is being called the X-Internet by some (for executable internet). Even though the online, interactive docs that come with the Curl IDE (Surge Lab) are excellent, and comprehensive (not to mention free), if you are serious about using Curl to put the web to work, then you should take a look at "Early Adopter Curl". It was written by a group of people that includs several Curl engineers, and has a lot of pertinent information on how to start developing with Curl. I've been involved with Curl since the first private Beta, and still found a lot of things that I still hadn't figured out on my own. "EA Curl" also makes a great reference, as it is sometimes a pain to be trying to switch between the online Curl Developer Guide and what you happen to be working on in the Lab IDE. I would put the target user level for this book at beginner -> advanced intermediate. If you are looking to do heavy duty 3D programming, and already are up to speed with Curl, you might be better off waiting for a more specialized book -- but for the rest of us, it's a valuable resouce. -Chris
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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
More Context Needed, February 22, 2002
This review is from: Early Adopter Curl (Paperback)
With a book of this nature, it's hard separating an evaluation of the book from an evaluation of the technology itself -- so I won't try too hard. Yes, the book showed certain evidence of haste in editing and proofing but the errors and weaknesses are not of the type to cause an early adopter to stumble. For instance, there is no index but chapters are distinct enough so that it is easy to find the broad categories. I eagerly picked up this book after attending a very impressive demo of Curl's capacities. Only skimming the two chapters on Object Oriented Programming, I concentrated on the other chapters most relevant to GUI developers of Web-based applications. Being an ardent practitioner of the W3C's Cascading Style Sheets technology, I was a bit disappointed in Curl's implementation of styles, which seems clumsy and very limited, even considering the differences in syntax. The authors were very knowledgeable on HTML and CSS issues -- which made their reliance on tables for layout a bit disturbing. Does this indicate that Curl lacks equivalents for CSS positioning and layout properties -- or merely that the authors did not happen to see this as important enough to include in examples? I was dissatisfied with the paucity of examples and the fact that these examples were not of the type of depth to glue the various parts of Curl together. There were some good examples involving 2-D and 3-D graphics which showed the technology to advantage. However, if your primary interest is in form-based Web applications, the examples were sketchy. The book really needs to have context. Criticism of Java, HTML, JavaScript, etc. is not enough.
The authors must speak more directly to the questions:
{}Does the Web world need another proprietary, Java-like browser plug-in?
{}Does the Curl organization have what it takes to go against Microsoft's .NET, which has a similar architecture and revenue model? Answer these questions and you not only have a good book, but a real cool winning tool.
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