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Book Review:
DHTML and CSS for the World Wide Web Book Title: Book Review: DHTML and CSS for the World Wide Web,
2nd Edition DHTML and CSS for the World Wide Web uses JavaScript exclusively to explain DHTML. It is non-partition and gives equal coverage to the DOM and Microsoft's proprietary IE version of the DOM. It even has exhaustingly thorough coverage of the proprietary Netscape Layers technology, which AOL/Netscape aborted after version 4 of their browser. The title of DHTML and CSS for the World Wide Web suggests the marketing gimmick that this book is. What else would you use DHTML and CSS for? You might use it for an Intranet. But an Intranet is still running on an HTTP server, which is the same thing you use to run a public web server. "World Wide Web" is nothing more than a catch-phrase to sucker naive people into buying this book. In defense of the publisher, Peachpit Press, I will say that they have a series of "for the World Wide Web" books. It still doesn't make it any less of a ridiculous title though. A better title for this book would be: The DHTML and CSS Cookbook, for it gives you a multitude of recipes for performing programmatic tasks rather than explaining DHTML and CSS in depth. It shows you how to do things such as dynamically move HTML elements, create custom scrollbars, change mouse pointer appearance, add multimedia to a web page, add downloadable fonts to a web page ... the list goes on and on and on. Some of this stuff is useful and practical information, but I never got the sense from reading this book that I really understood DHTML and CSS on more than a trivial level. Unless you're dealing with algorithms, cookbooks are generally a bad idea for programming. If you understand a programming-related subject, you generally do not need a cookbook. If you do need a cookbook, you generally don't know what you're doing and therefore shouldn't be programming. The examples in this book were strikingly horrendous. Teague has a gift for making examples that demonstrate everything but the point he is trying to make. My disillusionment with this book started in chapter 2 — "CSS Basics." Teague is trying to explain how to define class selectors. In the example code he defines two class selectors. One called .copy and the other called blockquote.copy. I read his example over and over. I read his explanation of the example over and over. And over and over in my mind I was saying? "WHY DOES HE NAME THESE SELECTORS COPY? WHAT IS BEING COPIED? WHAT IN GOD'S NAME IS HE TALKING ABOUT?!!!" Actually I think these words were not running through my mind. I think I was screaming them. There was nothing actually being copied in this example. Calling these selectors .copy was just an incredibly dumb, confusing, and misleading name for these selectors. If Teague doesn't know this, it's the job of the editor to point this out to him. I think the editors were asleep when they edited this book. No, I don't think asleep would be the correct word. A better word would be comatose. One of the most striking and comical aspects of my experience with this book was the technique I employed to identify where to find the source code in the myriad of downloadable examples which matched the source code being discussed in the book. Since the downloadable examples were named rather than numbered to match the numeric code listings in the book, it was a challenge to find the right example. However, I overcame the book's deficiency in providing clarity by exploiting the fact that the 2x2 inch snapshots of the example's web page output was displayed in the book. So what I did was obtain the actual file name of the example from the teeny-tiny, blurred little title bar displayed in the 2x2 inch snapshot. I am not however nearly as clever as I think I am, as I suffered partial blindness as a result of all the trauma to my eyeball from all that squinting. Don't be fooled by the length of this book. Many chapters are just filler. For example, there is one chapter on using Dreamweaver. One on using Adobe GoLive. I have never met anyone who has used GoLive. (Boy am I gonna get some hate mail now, but perhaps not because I don't think anyone actually uses this.) There's a whole chapter devoted to annoying proprietary things that you can do with IE, such as creating web page transitions or making elements fade or blur. There is a chapter on esoteric stuff about XML, SVG, and the future of the web, which is now obsolete. Yes, there is all kinds of stuff in this book that is unrelated to basic CSS and DHTML and not nearly enough attention paid to these topics. Save your money, folks. Reviewed by: Ed Phillips
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