SVG Essentials (O'Reilly XML) (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

SVG Essentials opens the door to the rich language that underpins this emerging and fast-growing graphics language. Scalable Vector Graphics, which are described through text like a programming language and can be read on any computer platform with the appropriate viewer, hold great promise for the Web designer who knows how to take advantage of the latent power. This book helps to harness that power.

It's important to note that this book is not written for Web designers looking to add SVG graphics to their sites, but rather for Web programmers who need to add such graphics based on information extracted from a database, or who want to add them by hand. If you have or use an application that can export or embed SVG graphics, you may not need this book. However, if you are looking to create dynamic images that get created on the fly, or perhaps be able to draw graphics based on information from the user or from a database, you've come to the right book.

Although only 330 pages, the book offers 13 chapters and six appendices. Everything from a basic overview of the SVG language through practical examples to the finer points of serving SVG files over the Web is thoroughly detailed, and each chapter is concisely written and rich with screenshots, illustrations, and code examples.

O'Reilly has earned a positive reputation for publishing outstanding technical books, and SVG Essentials makes a fine addition to their lineup. The SVG graphics standard is rapidly gaining ground. Backed by important vendors as Adobe, SVG is poised to be a powerful tool in the arsenal of today's Web designer. Keep this book within arm's reach of any SVG developer or Web designer who wants to take advantage of this emerging and powerful technology. --Mike Caputo

Product Description

Scalable Vector Graphics -- or SVG -- is the new XML-based graphics standard from the W3C that will enable Web documents to be smaller, faster and more interactive. J. David Eisenberg's insightful book takes you through the ins and outs of SVG, beginning with basics needed to create simple line drawings and then moving through more complicated features like filters, transformations, and integration with Java, Perl, and XSLT. SVG makes it possible for designers to escape the constant need to update graphics by hand or use custom code to generate bitmap images. While SVG was created with the Web in mind, the language has a variety of other uses. SVG makes it much easier to automate graphics generation, create charts and graphics based on a wide variety of data sources, or create images that users can zoom in on and explore. Whether you're a graphic designer looking for new tools, or a programmer creating and managing graphics, SVG Essentials provides you with a solid foundation.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 364 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1 edition (February 5, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596002238
• ISBN-13: 978-0596002237
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #524,242 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars In a Nutshell, March 16, 2002

By	Wesley T. Perkins (New Orleans, LA United States) - See all my reviews

This subject perfectly fits O'Reilly's "In a Nutshell" tradition, for SVG itself is just that: Web design, including text, graphics, animation, and programming, all in a nutshell -- concise, pithy, simple, and deep.

SVG, a refactoring of several generations of Web technology and a public standard approved by the World Wide Web Consortium, can be authored without any special tools and without any special background, other than the immediately productive background provided by this book.

Eisenberg swiftly, but with diverting variety, illuminates the process of drawing, assembling shapes, creating textures, transforming coordinates, structuring documents, enriching text, creating reusable components, fine tuning color, animating shapes and colors and structures, creating lighting effects, and programming user interactions. All of this is built upon the simple SVG architecture: arrange your elements in a hierarchy and set their attributes.

There is an art to conveying important points without belaboring them and Eisenberg moves from example to example with perfect pitch.

The book also contains an eight page section with full color images.

Some people have complained about the lack of reference books on SVG. The SVG reference is in fact widely available, all 500+ pages of it, on the W3C site. What is really needed, and would have been useful in this or any SVG book, is a five page guide to using that reference -- how do I, in ten seconds or so, determine whether this element can be a child of that element, or if this element supports this attribute?

While I was developing SVG Composer the only book available was Watt's "Designing SVG Web Graphics" (another fine book with a rather different pitch). When Eisenberg's work came out I happily relearned SVG, doing every example and picking up any number of new tricks.

I do have some reservations: I didn't care for the cat drawing (hated it!) and the final two chapters on generating and serving SVG seemed aimed at the wrong audience (adepts at Java, servlets, and Perl) though the material itself is perfectly fine.

At first I had the same feeling about the appendices, which include brief samples of subjects from programming to fonts to matrix algebra, that surely Eisenberg was misjudging his audience. However he may have things just right -- SVG may well become the greatest crossover hit ever in computer languages, a lingua franca for logic and art.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars In a Nutshell, March 16, 2002

By	Wesley T. Perkins (New Orleans, LA United States) - See all my reviews

This subject perfectly fits O'Reilly's "In a Nutshell" tradition, for SVG itself is just that: Web design, including text, graphics, animation, and programming, all in a nutshell -- concise, pithy, simple, and deep.

SVG, a refactoring of several generations of Web technology and a public standard approved by the World Wide Web Consortium, can be authored without any special tools and without any special background, other than the immediately productive background provided by this book.

Eisenberg swiftly, but with diverting variety, illuminates the process of drawing, assembling shapes, creating textures, transforming coordinates, structuring documents, enriching text, creating reusable components, fine tuning color, animating shapes and colors and structures, creating lighting effects, and programming user interactions. All of this is built upon the simple SVG architecture: arrange your elements in a hierarchy and set their attributes.

There is an art to conveying important points without belaboring them and Eisenberg moves from example to example with perfect pitch.

The book also contains an eight page section with full color images.

Some people have complained about the lack of reference books on SVG. The SVG reference is in fact widely available, all 500+ pages of it, on the W3C site. What is really needed, and would have been useful in this or any SVG book, is a five page guide to using that reference -- how do I, in ten seconds or so, determine whether this element can be a child of that element, or if this element supports this attribute?

While I was developing SVG Composer the only book available was Watt's "Designing SVG Web Graphics" (another fine book with a rather different pitch).. When Eisenberg's work came out I happily relearned SVG, doing every example and picking up any number of new tricks.

I do have some reservations: I didn't care for the cat drawing (hated it!) and the final two chapters on generating and serving SVG seemed aimed at the wrong audience (adepts at Java, servlets, and Perl) though the material itself is perfectly fine.

At first I had the same feeling about the appendices, which include brief samples of subjects from programming to fonts to matrix algebra, that surely Eisenberg was misjudging his audience. However he may have things just right -- SVG may well become the greatest crossover hit ever in computer languages, a lingua franca for logic and art.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good introduction, needs more recipes, March 22, 2004

By	Jack D. Herrington "engineer and author" (Silicon Valley, CA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

The book provides a solid introduction to SVG through an increasingly complex set of examples of SVG use. It is well written and edited, it also provides a thorough description of the entirety of the standard. What it lacks is more depth in the area of recipes for commonly used image effects. It also needs more advice about how complex SVGs are organized and built for efficiency. I understand that SVG is still on the adoption curve, so perhaps we could see these improvements in a second version of the book when the standard has picked up a little more.

For the time being the book earns it's four stars by providing a nice learning curve and having high quality examples that demonstrates the concepts effectively.