Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference (2nd Edition)

Html Dynamic

Building Dynamic HTML GUIs

Format: Paperback
Author: Steven Champeon
ReleaseDate: March, 1999
Publisher: Hungry Minds
Rating:

Great to learn how it evolves
The down side is that it talks a lot and maybe could fit more in if it didn't, but there are different reasons to buy different books. The best thing about this book is it says a liitle about NS, and then a little about IE, and the NS,IE,NS,IE on and on so you get a feel of who started what first and feel somewhat in the middle of the Netscape-Microsoft rivalry.

Good for beginners
The coding examples are good only if you are going to use their wrapper code to build your DHTML. This book is a good place to start for beginners or non-programmers. Being a programmer myself, I need to know how things work and just can't rely on someone else's code to magically do it for me. So, if you're looking for a quick way to get into DHTML this is the way to go. If you're looking for the "guts", this isn't the place.

Who is it written for?
Not so, sadly. With a title like this, I was expecting a book full of cut'n'paste mission-tested cross-browser code - real meat. Most of it is way back down the knowledge chain, with around half the book being a resume of interfaces, CGI, DOM etc. This part is written as if being explained to a newbie web author - much more a history than a coder's reference (explanations of what ASP and SSI is, for example). Nice read, but mostly old news to anyone technical.

The second part of the book moves into the code. Sadly, I found the demos neither particularly useful (much is made of a DHTML fridge-magnet game) nor particularly reliable cross-browser. The acid test is this: have I used any of the code in real-life projects, and do I regularly pick up the book to glean good stuff? The answer to both is no. This is not an O'Reilly-style bible that ends up dog-eared from use. It's got some nice ideas in the cross-browser code libraries, but nothing you couldn't download yourself from siteexperts. com, bratta. com or the usual resources. Sorry, guys, you've put a lot of work into this, but you don't seem to know who your audience is.