VRML Books

Well, I was tempted to pick this book up for sometime. It seemed to read very well and is chocked full of helpful examples - at least to me. Eventually I gave in and bought it. Oh yah, there was no CD but hey, all that stuff is available on the Web right? Well apparently, not in this case. And especially for a book written by authors with such distinguished credentials - Mr. Gulbransen et al ... not to mention a reputable publishing house - QUE ( they have produced good works in the past ) I have been unable in my efforts to unturn a single piece of code for this book.

Ironically, the helpfull ( we want your feedback ) page that Que places in all it's books was , well useless. Someone named Candy Hall did reply, only if it was to say - No! So the email trail looked like this:

Attention:

Alexander Kachur

Hi Alexander,

I bought this wonderful book
done by Que entitled:

Using XML (second edition) by David Gulbransen, et al ...

Well, it didn't come with a CD

so naturally I was expecting to be directed
to some web page where I could download
the examples discussed in the book.

Can you help me out. and tell me just
what the URL is for that download page?

I visited your website but did not see any such
link ...

and when I sent an email off to Que Publishing
as identified in the forward for the book,

the response from Candy Hall was not
encouraging. This is what I got:

Thank you for your email about Special Edition Using XML. I'm glad you like
the book. Unfortunately the code for this book is not available for
download.
Candy Hall

Well, the declaration on the front of the book reads:
" The only xml book you need "
fine, it's a great book, but I need the code ...

If you can possibly point me to where I can
download this or email me a zipped archive
I would truly appreciate your help.

Thanking You
in advance

Dwight Lemaire

Alexander Kachur

Hi Alexander,

I bought this wonderful book
done by Que entitled:

Using XML (second edition) by David Gulbransen, et al ...

Well, it didn't come with a CD

so naturally I was expecting to be directed
to some web page where I could download
the examples discussed in the book.

Can you help me out. and tell me just
what the URL is for that download page?

I visited your website but did not see any such
link ...

and when I sent an email off to Que Publishing
as identified in the forward for the book,

the response from Candy Hall was not
encouraging. This is what I got:

Thank you for your email about Special Edition Using XML. I'm glad you like
the book. Unfortunately the code for this book is not available for
download.
Candy Hall

Well, the declaration on the front of the book reads:
" The only xml book you need "
fine, it's a great book, but I need the code ...

If you can possibly point me to where I can
download this or email me a zipped archive
I would truly appreciate your help.

Thanking You
in advance

Dwight Lemaire

............. Well, Alexander never answered because
I kept getting Mail Administrator responses saying the
plug was pulled on his email.

In spite of the apparently all negative reviews on-line
about things like content, and gross inaccuraies, I find
there are salvaging comments to make about this book.
Essentially, it works for me .... however, there is no Code
to be found for it anywhere. Gulbransen cannot be contacted.
Que denies any code is available for this book. Well, what did
they use to put it together anyway? This spoils everyone's
reputation for excellence in providing information and follow-ups doesn't it? In conclusion, Gulbransen and el should be shamed into leaving this work as is. Que should be shamed of providing no support ( inspite of the friendly teaser page).
Shame Shame Shame Shame Shame.

At times like these, one really appreciates an Oreilly Text. I'll never stray again ..

This book covers a wide breadth of topics in XML, without going thoroughly into the depths of any one topic. It often refers the reader to other materials for depth information. This is as it should be, but then the byline "The ONLY XML book you need" is somewhat dishonest marketing; they should remove it.

Second, _Using XML_ has quite a few typographical errors. So far I've found more than one per 10 pages, more than I'd expect for a Second Edition book.

Far worse, the book contains technical errors and is not clear on important points. As an example of the first grievance, p. 44 states that PCDATA cannot contain <, >, and / characters. In fact, it cannot contain "<" or "&"; ">" can legally appear, but should be escaped for compatibility with SGML, and "/" is just fine. An example on p. 94 puts comments before , yet the xml prolog must occur first in any document (even before whitespace). Mr. Gulbransen should know that. Page 91 uses an unparsed entity inline, violating Well-Formedness Constraint: Parsed Entity. And the example soc="123-00-1234" p. 83 violates Validity Constraint: ID, because a SSN is not a valid Name. Having found all these technical errors in the areas of XML I do know, how can I trust this book to correctly teach me things I don't know?

I also can't say the book is very clear in places where I want it to be. After pp. 130-133, I should know how to associate XML Schemas with XML documents. Instead, I can only blindly follow the example; I surely don't understand what is the role of each of the components, especially of the URI ending with "/contact".

Due to technical inaccuracies and occasional lack of clarity, I cannot recommend this book. I would like to find an XML reference which is similarly broad in scope, yet both clear and correct in its details.

Michael Floyd's Special Edition Using XSLT starts with an informative and accessible overview clearly explaining how XSLT fits into the bigger picture of the Extensible Stylesheet Language, and the differences between XSLT and XSL-FO. Special Edition Using XSLT then demonstrates practical examples of XSL transformations from XML to a variety of other useful formats including HTML, PDF, SVG and others. Later chapters discuss developer techniques for implementing XSLT within dynamic web environments including ASP and JSP. Flyod also covers debugging techniques and how XSLT relates to .NET. Highly recommended for beginning to intermediate level users, Special Edition Using XSLT then concludes with a useful reference section including detailed coverage of XSLT, XPath and XSL-FO. 480 pages.

Granted; XSLT and XPATH in particular aren't easy to cope with, but I did never find the "key" to the sequence of material in this book. Especially XPATH must be covered better, since XPATH are so central in XSLT.

When you also find typos, such as not well-formed XML in the examples, you waste time to figure out if the XML itself is correct or not.

In short, I didn't like this book.

I purchased this guide (along with several others) to gain an understanding of the web programming job market.

This book contains just enough information so that you can get the
job in web programming, and start earning.

This book will help you land a job.

So, no, this is not a reference "bible" or web programming manual. Anyone
who purchases this book alone as a web programming refernce should
consider purchasing another book.

But if you want to learn about how to land the web progamming job, then
this is a good buy.

In short, this is a troubleshooting guide compiled by someone who has no knowledge of Web Programming. I think the text is copied from some technical forum or Blog...I am not sure how the manages to get published, but he has written similar books on many other topics, sold on Amazon. I think the author publishes his own books. Authors credentials are not mentioned anywhere in the book (just the name)....the book has no logical flow or content management. It is highly disorganized...actually after reading few pages you will even forget anything you know about Web Programming ....

With so few truly useful VRML books on the market, it is lclear that writers are at a premium. While this book was useful in putting the VRML phenomenon into perspective and allowing newbies a glimpse into its programming worth, it was a little shallow on actual content. It would have been nice to get some hardcore coding in while the business is still new. A mark could be made. Sadly, there are too many books of this quality. I recommend this one if you want to know more about where VRML is going, but not if you are a part of that direction.

This is a great book for HTML beginners, it outlines most of the basics in html and shows how to do some cool stuff with lists & tables. This is a good book to have on your shelf for referance, it's also great value for money. The one thing it did lack is extensive examples of posting forms to a file, creating scrollers, changing scrollbar attributes and making the page refresh. 3/5.

This book is a massive tome, but its informative contentis much lower than its weight suggests. Part of this isbecause the book pays too little attention to teaching the Perl it uses in its examples; it also comes from the use of other Unix tools like lex and sgmls that most beginners will not recognise. As a beginner's book, it's an exercise in frustration, but those who already know its subject matter should find the examples interesting starting points for their own CGI projects. For a good beginning text, try Thomas Boutell's CGI book (also available from amazon.com).

Reviewer: Budianto

This book is not ideal learning XML. it help you to learn how to develop web applicatin , and keeps many key skills in their own chapters,even if they would be needed together.

I have read books about HTML, JavaScript, C++ and honestly THIS BOOK IS THE WORST that I have ever read! I wanted to learn some XML from this book, it starts talking about its capabilities, use, implementation, functionality, examples, examples, blah, blah, blah... zzzzz.
If you want to learn how to use XML take my advice, do not consider this book. However, if you know XML this book has examples of how can XML be implemented, though I think it is not worth its price.

Definitely this book is for those who dont wanna know XML, it contains nothing.

You'll spend most of your time waiting for something to happen. There is essentially no connection between the CD-ROM and the text.

Others have already said it better than I, so I'll keep this short:

* not enough information to be useful

* poor presentation of the details

* it only babbles on and on about how great XML is, without telling you anything about any pitfalls or, for example, the shortcomings of DTDs.

Charles Goldfarb should actually look at these books, before lending his name to them.

If you want the real deal, go with the Wrox Press book: Professional XML. Sure, it's big, weighs a ton, and you'll probably never need to look at more than a third of it, but I swear even just the first 4 chapters are worth the price of the entire book!

I was greatly disappointed with the contents of this book and above all after learning that the editor is the one who invented SGML(Mother of XML)...they should think a hundred times before writing this kinda books. Please stop circulating this book in the market. Why are you people giving wrong information to people???

This is absolutely the worst book I have ever attempted to read. I agree with the other reviewers' remarks concerning the author's cutesy feeble attempts at humor. More irritating, however, is his failure to describe adequately the topics on which he touches, and the organization of the book is poor. He tells you part of something in one chapter, and maybe another part of it in another chapter - or not at all. When you apply the instructions he provides, the result often doesn't work, and there is nothing in the book to help you figure out why.

Most of the section headings are extremely stupid puns. Now, I have nothing against puns, mind you, but there is an enormous difference between a smart pun and a stupid one. Damon Dean must not be able to get the smart ones. Yet from a navigational standpoint, using puns in headings is really stupid. The headings are what a reader relies on to locate a topic. Any competent writer knows that. When puns are used in the headings, the reader is at a real loss about the subsumed topic, which completely defeats the purpose of the headings in the first place.

The old adage "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with B. S." no doubt applies here. Generally when a speaker or writer succeeds only in confusing the audience, it's because he doesn't know what he's talking about. I would venture to say that that is the case with Damon Dean.

If this were the only book a person had for learning how to use cascading style sheets, he would give up on the subject altogether before he got halfway through. I, for one, will never waste my money on a "For Dummies" book again!

The writing in this book is muddy, and like another reviewer here, I had to buy a second book to figure out what this book was saying. Since Dummies books are for beginners, a logical order running from easy to difficult should be used. This author is all over the place.

The above is bad enough, then add to this the obvious fact that the book was merely spell-checked but never looked at by an editor (or at least by one who knows grammar and syntax).

The code isn't consistent, and the index has errors.

Don't buy this book. It was obviously pushed out the publisher's door without any attempt to make sure customers get their money's worth. Don't you get ripped off too.

Full of errors and mistakes -- not only this, but the author is impossible to follow. Had to buy another book on the topic. Stay away.

While it's true that the Dummies series are supposed to provide a way for the less-proficient to easily get their feet wet, this installment is so annoyingly scripted as to be headache-inducing. The author attempts to lighten the load by injecting humor into the book. But the jokes are bad and they mostly just clutter the author's run-on sentences. The text is so cutesy at times I found myself actually getting fatigued reading it. This book could be simplified and probably cut down by 50 pages if the author would dispense with the "funny" interjections and just focus on the topic.

Of course, it's just a beginner's guide, so the book serves no practical reference purpose after you get through it.

The author mingles in many personal remarks which clutters the content substantially, making for a difficult, annoying read. After finding another introductory & intermediate CSS book, & then comparing the two, I can honestly say CSS For Dummies is not organized well, has examples which do not contain vital information or a variety of applications. Based on other books I've owned & read, this book is a poor choice when learning CSS.

Worst of all, there was at least one sample file on the included CD where illegal [chemical] use was cited in the text (see Ch8_fixed.html on the CD - the author writes about "being pissed", and taking [a chemical]). Examples as this clearly make the book an undesirable selection - especially for youth trying to learn CSS. There are simply no reasons for either using offensive language or blatant references to illegal [chemical] use in a book like this.

I'll never buy another "Dummies" book again.

I only just got the book, but the people who complained that it doesn't stand up to the usually high O'Reilly standards are spot on. The second chapter, which is all about "getting started" ought to explain basic concepts clearly. Instead it throws out all kinds of mumbo jumbo and forward references like "You could also define this style rule in an external stylesheet and make that stylesheet part of the package for your application, as we do later in this chapter ...." Why? Why should I keep reading to find out? Why does the first chapter of real content (chapter one understandably explains more background on mozilla and XPFE) seem to have a forward reference every third paragraph?

Clearly, the authors did not sit down and make a coherent plan of what the best way to introduce each topic to the neophyte. This stands in stark contrast to the various O'Reilly Perl books that always seem to give the overview in clear terms and then flesh it out, instead of diving into the middle and trying to explain it as you go.

The only reason right now to get this book is because it appears to be the only (or one of the only) ones on the topic at this time. Hopefully _Rapid Application Development with Mozilla_ due out in November this year will get it right.

I was always interested in creating my own apps for Mozilla. I had played around with some of the custom CSS files and peeked at the XUL files, and I wanted to learn more. I figured that buying this book would be a no-brainer because of the O'Reilly name and my good experiences with the ... Hacks series. This could of been a good book, but it seems like they were rushed to meet a publishing deadline. It starts out building a skeleton application (xFly) to explain the simpler concepts. One would expect that they would continue to flesh out the framework, and they would show how to add function to the various widgets. After Chapter 2, they abandon this idea. The examples they do provide don't work correctly. If you get the finished xFly demo program from mozdev.org, it does not work either. The site reads "This requires serious attention". I agree. This book is a good reference manual, but a poor tutorial. If you want a good tutorial on how to build Mozilla apps, try xulplanet.org instead. Co-incidentally, this entire book is available at the aforementioned site if you would like to preview this book for yourself before plunking down $40 to buy it.

I happened to be experimenting with XUL and Mozilla at the time that I ran across this book, so I was very eager to get into it and see if it could help clarify some of the gaping holes in the existing XUL documentation within Mozilla. As an exhaustive reference to XUL and the associated technologies that are used to build Mozilla applications, it was very successful. As a higher level tutorial that explains the relationships between the different technologies and their uses, it was not quite as successful.

Chapters 1-6 lead the reader through the progressive steps required to build and package a Mozilla-based application. The authors create a demo application called xFly which is used as a test bed to show the different features of XUL, CSS, and JavaScript. By the end of Chapter 6, this application contains a tree control, a bunch of sample menus, and various other assorted UI widgets. But it doesn't really _do_ anything. Maybe I'm too picky, but I'd rather see an application that has some function, even if all it does is play tick-tack-toe. Then, to me at lease, it's much clearer how the different pieces would fit together in a "real-world" application.

Chapters 7-12 cover more exotic and difficult aspects of Mozilla
programming such as the Extensible Binding Language (XBL), XPCOM (Mozilla's component object model), and accessing web services from XUL applications. These chapters are very dense in technical details, with good references to online resources for further study. Overall, I found this book to be a very succinct source of accurate information about building applications with Mozilla. Its only weakness seems to be that it focuses too much on low-level implementation details without giving the reader (who may be new to the idea of XML-based GUI
application programming entirely) a good high-level overview of the benefits of this type of development and which technologies serve which purpose. Chapter 1 is the only chapter that explicitly addresses high-level application architecture, and it is only 8 pages long.

The bottom line is that this is a good reference book for people who already know how and why to build applications based on Mozilla, but a not-so-good introduction and tutorial for people who are completely new to the XUL-CSS-JavaScript paradigm of application development.

This was the first Mozilla XUL book that I read; I now have Nigel McFarlane's book as well. I find it useful to have more than one reference book as I can often find things in one that are not in the other.

I found this book quick and easy to read and a good introduction whilst also going into sufficent detail.

Importantly for me it contains information on how to go about creating a remote application to run over the Internet and using serverside PHP, neither of which have I seen mentioned elsewhere.

The book is not perfect but it is useful and I think some of the other reviewers have been unduly harsh; I am glad that I was not put off.

This book gives a solid grounding in the principles involved and acts as a primer to the nitty gritty of producing a XUL application. In practice, XUL is pretty easy but it's easy to be caught unawares which is where a book like this comes in. If you've ever wondered how to extend Mozilla with a new button, or why your chrome doesn't work, or why Mozilla ignores it, or how to write a new chrome application then this is the book for you. Learn the principles of XUL and things fall into place very easily.

I am puzzled that other reviewers claim XUL and Mozilla are not ready for mainstream since the fact that an entire browser, mail, chat, editor, JS debugger and hundreds more third party extensions and apps have been written using it demonstrates it is. It certainly needs tools and add robustness, but it is already a viable and strong technology for producing platform neutral applications.

It is well worth the money, however it should be revised to reflect the latest Mozilla developments. As an added bonus, the source for this book is actually online so you can evaluate it yourself at books.mozdev.org before buying it.