For a long time, Mac programmers have favored Bare Bones software's BBEdit text editor for the Macintosh as a source-code editor. Now the software has gained new life as an HTML editor for producing Web documents. In fact, the latest release of this venerable program contains plenty of extras that speed HTML generation.
BBEdit 4 for Macintosh teaches a beginner how to use BBEdit to create, modify, and save text files on Macintosh computers. Author Mark Bell starts by showing you how to install BBEdit, open files with it, and perform basic text-editing tasks. He explains how to search and then dispenses a crash course in HTML syntax and gets into BBEdit's HTML-editing extensions. Web publishing is a major thrust of this book, occupying about a third of its pages. Toward the end, Bell exposes the rudiments of scripting with Frontier and AppleScript.
Throughout, Bell's descriptive prose and concise step-by-step procedures are backed up by copious illustrations--practically every paragraph has a screen shot next to it. The illustrations look small until you realize that they're absolutely readable; you're left wondering why the pictures in most computer books are so huge.
This book could best be improved by the inclusion of the BBEdit Lite software, which is available as shareware on the Web. (Currently, this book is not accompanied by a disk.)
From Library Journal
Long a familiar tool in the Mac community, BBedit, which stands for "bare bones editor," is just that. This basic program can edit anything and everything. Most people use it for text and text-like files, but it can also manipulate a software application such as Photoshop. Granted, almost no one would want to do such a thing, but it points out the power of BBedit, which is becoming very popular for HTML and scripting. It isn't a wysiwyg, but it handles anything from HTML to Java to cascading style sheets and more. Bell's book is the perfect sidekick to Bbedit, which, like the tool itself, is simple, clear, and totally indispensable. This will circulate in public and academic libraries; large collections might consider multiple copies.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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