Customer Reviews

Essential XUL Programming

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

xul appears to have changed a lot since this book was printed.
many of the xul tags discussed and used, the xul templates used,
have changed. thus, most of the xul examples in the book are
not going to work in firefox.

e.g. the xul css skin url is no longer the same. lots of tags
such as "titledbox" have been renamed.

i'd say this content is deprecated.

also, in my opinion, these chapters add no value
to the book and in general weakens the
existing content:

an xml primer
css
the jxul project

Bought this book about a month ago, so I think I've had a pretty good chance to review it. It's very good, despite the fact that Mozilla hasn't got up off their keesters yet! I'm an XML developer with limited Java experience, but the JXUL project they put in there as their open source project is very, very cool! That I think was worth the price of the book.

I personally thought the RDF chapter was a monster (scary to me!) but very well covered! I'm sure when I progress as a programmer I'll be doing a lot of the RDF.

I think the book is very well written, especially considering I am still a beginner/intermediate web developer.

I just picked up a copy of this book a few days ago, and I was impressed with the in-depth sections on the book (XBL, RDF & XUL Templates, for example). I feel that the book is layed out in a very good way - the first section has overview of 'the basics' (CSS, XML, XUL), the second section has advanced features, and the third section had case studies. For people who are new to programming, and don't know XML, I would recommend another book before you start this one. The later chapters may be too complex and hard to digest for non-programmers.

For me, I am familiar with XML and some of the Mozilla technologies, so I could skip over the intro section of the book. I am finding a lot of benefit out of the XUL Programmer's Reference section, as well as the advanced section. This book, used in combination with xulplanet.com, can be a good resource.

I bought this because of the JXUL project. To that end I found this book very handy to understand that basics, intermediate aspects and application of XUL, RDF, XBL, etc.

A lot of time is spent talking about Mozilla (obviously). The problem is that a lot of that content will be quickly out of date. Discussion of other projects like Luxor (like JXUL), Xavier (server side) and the enhancements made in Mozilla since being published would make a welcome second edition. May-be wait for Mozilla 1.0.

Hey just picked this up at BN (sshh!) but I had to write a review about it. This is a superb book! Some thought was obviously put into this book as it is very well organized. There were some minor inconsistencies, but Hey, with the way Mozilla and those folks at Netscape have handled the last two years, it's a wonder the authors could get something out with such high quality. As a web systems/UI developer, I've found that most UI books are fairly fluffy with lots of pictures, but no real "meat on the bones". This book definitely breaks the mold.

I really enjoyed the case studies. It's obvious that the authors care about their profession, as they seem to poke fun at themselves and world in general, than most open source developers poke fun at Microsoft.

I'm glad that someone, I mean someone put out a theme reference. There is not even one reference out on the Net. Although it's changed in the last few weeks with the new release of Netscape 6.1, I found that they are already working on the corrections to the theme reference on the book's companion website.

I also thought the XBL, RDF, and XUL Templates material was very well covered and very professional.

In my line of work with SGML, the transition into XML comes pretty natural and with that the notion of "Hey, there is really a lot of cool stuff one can achieve with this!". Especially when you add XUL, XBL, RDF, and JavaScript/DOM to this.
Thats where this book comes in really handy. The chapters are laid out pretty well and don't require a lot of experience with XML, although some basic knowledge of how a markup language work helps. The only downside about the whole XUL at the moment (in my view) is that its currently only supported in Netscape 6.x. The XUL support in Mozilla got broken somewhere between milestone release 0.92 and 0.94. However, the jXUL project looks really promising and would certainly make up for the lack of browser support since this will run as stand-alone applications in a "Runner" application.

As others have mentioned, the chapter on RDF was pretty scary and daunting and should be revisited by the reader a couple of times. There are of course lots of RDF resources on the web that could provide more help and insight.

The chapter on Netscape Themes (including the appendix containing all the different images and buttons used) could probably be left out in the next edition, to give more room for RDF or DOM?

Grand total; A very good book on this topic that certainly will inspire the reader for further research in this area.

I am a programmer interested in XML technologies, but I was not so familiar with XUL. I found that the book was fairly easy to read for someone new to the subject. It gave me the slow-paced tour of the technologies involved, and with the help of the code on the book's web site, I am able to watch the examples work. I'm now finishing up the case studies section, and I'm able to see how all of the technologies work together. This is a cool book about a cool technology. I would recommend that if anyone is interested in a differen approach to user interfaces, this book is for you.

I read through Essential XUL, and I think that this is an extremely well-written book. As a developer, I've found that it has been difficult to get a lot of this information from some of the Internet documentation out there, and I'm glad that I can actually have this book to carry around. I also think the JXUL project that is discussed in the book is a good idea.

I bought this because because of the JXUL project. To the end I found this book very handy to understand that basics of XUL programming and quickly got me up to speed.

A lot of time is spent talking about Mozilla (obviously). The problem is that a lot of that content will be quickly out of date. Discussion of other projects like Luxor, Xavier and the enhancements made in Mozilla since being published would make a welcome second edition. May-be wait for Mozilla 1.0.

This is an exceptional "how-to" on a technology that thrills me as a frustrated UI developer. A big frustration to the UI developer is how to be "all things to all people". Usually, the UI developer gets stuck in the middle of a political war over preferences of different users. You build a wonderful application that does some really neat things, and all of your comments about where you put a button. I know that everyone has been there. Users are different and have different interface requirements. XML has brought flexible interfaces between systems, and this is a wonderful example of bringing flexibility to the user. I think this an excellent book for any professional software engineer to read, especially those who specialize in UI development. The toughest thing that we encounter in software is the "that is a wonderful idea, but can you do it." This books shows you how.