Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Bug Infested, Verbose, Pretty Pictures., May 3, 2004
Very high quality paper, printing, photos, and binding. But in my opinion...
The content is low quality. If you have to read this book for a class, you have my sympathies. If you do not absolutely have to read Carey's book, find another HTML book.
XHTML claim: The cover says "Includes XHTML coverage throughout". I found precious little to support that. I did find XHTML code violations all over the book and code files.
Next the errors: I downloaded the student files on 4/27/04. Every code file which I tested with XHTML code validation (strict, transitional, and frameset) failed miserably. There are case (upper/lower) violations. There are mostly tag closing (xhtml) errors throughout. There are unbalanced tags like in figure 5-19 on page 5-20. There are missing quotes like in figure 5-29 on page 5-27. There are instructional (bold) typos like item 3 on page 5-33. There is the demo on the author's web site which does not work (as of this date) on page 6-46. There is the JavaScript if/else error repeated five (5) times on pages 8-31 and 8-32 before getting it right at the bottom of 8-32. There are others.
Verbose: Carey uses too many words, stories, and pages to convey a limited amount of HTML. Maybe he should switch to dime store novels so that he can entertain people who want that.
Off Purpose: Cary spent 2 out of 10 chapters on JavaScript when he should have used the ink to finish the job of covering HTML and CSS. JavaScript is too big of a job to cover in 2 chapters and he did not finish either HTML or CSS first. This makes for a disjointed and incomplete book.
Publisher errors: What was the publisher doing to pass this many problems? This confirms something I read from another reviewer regarding Course Technologies. I doubt quality is very important at Course Technologies / Thompson Learning. These guys are off my "buy list".
The book does have some good information and value, but there are too many problems which get into the way. I wish I had not purchased this very expensive book, or had not marked in it, so that it could be returned.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
An obvious retrofit, May 18, 2007
What originally attracted me to this text was that the code examples use valid XHTML. Unfortunately, the book is obviously a rewrite of an older book written with 1995-era design and structure approaches. Formatting attributes within the HTML tags have merely been replaced by inline styles, defeating the purpose of having a style sheet in the first place. Not until Tutorial 7 is there an external style sheet. There is even a chapter on how to design a site with tables; i.e., the old school way, and one can sense the author's comfort throughout that chapter. While it's good to be familiar with that approach, since one will run into such sites and have to work with them, to have such a large portion of the text devoted to it seems inappropriate in 2006 (this edition's printing). When HTML elements are employed in a modern fashion, there is some faltering, such as the label tag for an input element being followed by a break tag instead of setting its display property to block in the stylesheet, thus requiring as many break tags as there are labels. And as with many of the Course Technology books, the page numbers restart with each major section: the HTML section ends at HTML 578, then there are some additional cases (HTML ADD 1, HTML ADD 2, etc), then XML ends at XML 224, then there are appendices HTML A1 through HTML J16, then an XML appendix, then Ref 1 through 27 (reference section). At least the index indicates both the HTML and XML sections. One could complete this very thick book and be an expert at creating web sites the way we used to do it in the mid-nineties, the only enhancement being that the sites would be valid. I do think that many of the exercises could be reworked to be quite valuable, and I should mention that much of the instructional text is well done. The book is printed on very thin paper, as are many of the Course textbooks, but there is color throughout. I would not recommend this text to anyone considering adopting it as a class text.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Overall...a informative book., November 25, 2004
I was assigned to study this book for college credit. Although the book is very large (about 1000 pages), I completed studying it in about 2 weeks. I was impressed by how well it was written and was easy to follow. Everything that was taught was then applied to 'hands-on' tutorials.
At the end of each section are various Case problems, which allow you to apply what you've learned and design a sample web page, either in HTML, JavaScript, or XML. You will find that some of the files they give you have supposed 'typos'. However, I think that some of these are intentional. For example, the sections on XML validation though DTD's and Schemas have numerous 'typos' in the included files. But these are necessary to test out your work.
There are a few 'unintentional typos' as well in the book, but you will find that in any course. If I were to complain about anything, it may be that too little attention was given to XHTML and XML.
Overall, this course can be easily grasped by most, from the beginning student to the advanced.
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