Customer Reviews

Pro Internet Explorer 8 & 9 Development: Developing Powerful Applications for The Next Generation of IE

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

 

 

This is definitely a "PRO" level guide to Internet Explorer. In the words of author Matthew Crowley, "...an insider's view on how the browser operates as well as intimate access to its public API..." The book delivers. I never knew there was this much to know about a web browser. The author starts with a good architectural overview of IE and then systematically moves through various topics on harnessing the features of IE. Chapter 2 (Interoperability and Compatibility) should be required reading for any web developer. There is great information about how IE works and how Microsoft has managed compatibility issues over the past few releases. I also found chapters 5 & 6 (Developer Tools, Debugging with Fiddler) to be very useful. The book is filled with code examples and each chapter stands by itself as a reference. I appreciate how the author starts each chapter with an overview of what he will cover and then ends each chapter with a summary. It you have to deal with IE on a daily basis this book can help. If you are writing applications for IE then this book is invaluable.

When most of us are browsing the web with the latest and fastest web browsers, developers that are used to work with IE are facing the unthinkable: should we start to develop for other browsers? unfortunately, there's no easy answer for this question, however, after reading this book, I think there seems to be hope for the developers that still are on IE side.

One of the features that I liked the most about his book is thoroughness, in fact, there were a couple of times that I thought I was reading something else because there are too many features about IE that the average developer - like myself - are not aware of but rest assured, you'll change the way you look at IE after reading this book.

If there's something anyone likes (developer or not) is honesty, this book is honest or honestly written if you will, Matthew Crowley warns everyone that web development is hard, that we must face several difficulties and make choices in order to get our developments right, some choices will be made in order to be up to date and others to comply with real customer's requests sometimes both will be incompatible.

This book deserves 5 stars because of the following chapters:

Chapter 2 Interoperability and Compatibility.- a short but concise list of features that are not championed by the people of IE community plus a succinct and useful list of reasons why web development is not easy (The web developer's dilemma, p 52)

Chapter 3 Enriching Web Applications with AJAX and JSON.- one of the reasons why other web browser are becoming more popular is the use of these two technologies and although there's a bunch of information around about them, it's hard to find some insight when it comes to IE, so look no further, this chapter is going to be a real treat for the AJAX and JSON developer.

Chapter 5 Debugging and Inspecting Pages with Developer Tools.- a handful of very good examples of debugging and how-to's.

Hi,

Can I ask if there is a (source code) supplementary material accompanying this book? If so, where can I download it from, please?

As I understand it, the source code should exist somewhere, since the author states in page 276 (paragraph 3): "This interface is defined in another class included in the companion project accompanying this book."

Many thanks in advance,

At some point of web development, especially when you are trouble-shooting an uncommon issue, it is good to know the details and inner workings of IE. This book is a broad and systematic overview of IE features and functionality. I am grateful for the author's effort of compiling this book of useful information. I particular liked the coverage of the following topics:

--Browser Helper Objects (BHO) and developer tools

--Trident Layout and rendering engine

--Cross-Domain Request Objects

--Networking and Zones

--Security, Trust, and Privacy Architecture

The book also has good coverage on:

--XMLHttpRequest

--Native JSON Support

--Persisting Data with DOM Storage

There are some aspects of this book I don't really enjoy as much as I hoped. First, the chapter organization is not really user friendly. Chapter one is very long, one section after another, made me feeling reading a substantial research paper. Then chapter two and three are very short, made me feeling something is missing. Another aspect I don't like as much is the book is concept driven, lack of examples. Finally, some sections should be more deep dive rather than an introduction. This book has relatively light coverage on Securing Persisted Storage, for example. Overall, it is a useful book to have and use as a reference.