Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great all-in-one, but too Microsoft-centric, November 24, 2005
This book overall is the best general introduction to website development technologies that I've found. I'm coming from the perspective of a professor who needed to teach HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and any server-side scripting language to my students. After deciding to use PHP, I loked for several appropriate books, and I did find numerous good options, but at the very most, any given book would only cover two of the technologies I needed. Thus, I would end up with at least three or four books that had way more than necessary and would cost up to $200 for one course.
Eventually I discovered Deitel's all-in-wonder, and found an excellent textbook that includes every possible Web technology that I might consider in one reasonably priced book. It has at least one introductory chapter on every technology. Note that everything in the book is simply introductory--very appropriate for a first-level course. It serves as a life-time reference that helps a student or Web developer enter into any given Web technology in a tutorial format. However, to get more advanced, the developer will absolutely have to find a dedicated book on the technology of interest--this book is not for advanced topics; it just gets you in the door--but productively so!
Specifically, the book has at least one full introductory chapter (sometimes two) on: XHTML, CSS, Flash, Dreamweaver, XML, ASP.NET, Perl, PHP, and Coldfusion. It has 10 full chapters on JavaScript that fully teach a non-programmer from scratch how to program (hence the title of the book)--however, I have serious disagreement with their Microsoft-centric approach, as I mention below. The book also has a chapter each on web graphics, web servers, and databases.
In addition, the book includes a CD with complete PDF chapters on VBScript, ASP (not .NET), Python, JSP, and lots more. The chapters are clear, and the authors make a good selection of the most important and useful functions and features, that give students a solid base to get on their feet web programming.
However, the book has one very serious systematic flaw: The writers only used Internet Explorer and completely ignored compatibility with other browsers. I strongly emphasize to my students programming for Web standards, and this is very difficult to do with this book--in fact, it is impossible the way they teach JavaScript. Many of their code examples simply will not work with browsers that follow W3C standards such as Firefox and Opera. I eventually had to give up on teaching students work-arounds for the book's code, and just gave in to Microsoft. Obviously, this is not an acceptable compromise for some people, so this book might be disqualified for this one reason alone. However, I find the book extremely valuable nonetheless--for this reason the book does not deserve five stars.
For my purposes, it is the best choice available, and if not for its exclusive focus on Microsoft Internet Explorer, it would be a near-perfect introductory book on every significant web technology.
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42 of 50 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Deitel Considered Dangerous, October 15, 2004
I was unfortunately subjected to the second edition of this book during my graduate studies at DTU. In my opinion there's only one good thing to say about this book, and that is that it's the only book I've seen where you get a comprehensive introduction to all of the techniques for developing and serving web-pages. Unfortunately, the authors are living in a Miocrosoft Internet Explorer only world, which especially is reflected in their chapters on (x)html and javascript. Problem is, no version of IE is actually capable of understanding xhtml, so what you are in fact taught is xhtml 1.0 served as text/html which is treated as hmtl 4.01 in all browsers. Even worse, the third edition has rewritten all the examples in xhmtl 1.1 which *should*not* be served as text/html. Even worse, the xhtml examples given will trigger an error in IE 6 that will get IE 6 to behave as IE 5.5 in quirks mode - inclusive the css box model error. As to the javascript examples, the book isn't teaching you the w3c DOM but only the IE DOM, thus all examples using eg document.all will possibly fail in some browsers. And document.write isn't allowed if you are serving your pages as application/xhmtl+xml. I'm considering this book dangerous because it doesn't teach you how to code according to the w3c standards but only according to the 'Microsoft standard'
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A mixed bag of fruits, May 24, 2007
It's tough to rate this book. On one end, you get alot of web technologies in one package: xhtml, javascript, xml, asp.net, php, python, sql, etc, etc. On the other end, however, some sections are severely lacking. The PHP section is very short and topics such as PHP classes aren't even mentioned. The main problem with this book is that it's trying to create something that is just too ambitious. There are many commands, for every scripting language I mentioned above, that are missing. IMHO, I think the Deitels are good authors. Their C++ series is phenomenal and it really taught me how to program in C++. This book, while it does contain the great writing style of Deitels, is unfortunately incomplete in too many aspects.
If you want to learn a scripting language, then it would be a good idea to purchase a book which focuses on that language alone and not 10,000 others at once.
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