HTML Books

The book is very readable; I read half the book in one sitting and found that the flow from one topic to the next was very natural.

To start with this book covers pretty much all versions of MSXML, including older non standard features such as WD-xsl. Naturally there is more focus on the new standards, but examples and recommendations are given for all. One feature I very much appreciated was a list of versions that shipped various OS / Browser / Major Applications.

This book also scores highly as a lot of examples are giving in Jscript, but also includes examples in VB COM and VBScript.

MSXML4 is the fastest XML parser in the world and this book gives you needed details to take advantage of it. Some of these chapters are a gold mine. Some have obviously been sitting around from a couple years ago.
Please Wrox, stop it! I'll pay the same price to have the gold mine chapters alone.
Micheal Corning's chapter is filled with truly worthwhile stuff about the parser, coming as it does from Redmond. Danny Ayer's chapter on implement a XLink system is really brilliant and well written. Corning and Ayer show that you can be thoughtful and literate when writing about the specifics of a new technology.

The chapter on XPath is really incomplete to the point of not being an unusable reference. For the concat function we are given the example of concat('sku','562','B'). Now exactly why would anyone do this? Pointless examples do not help anyone. The concat function is almost always used for placing XML data with literal text. I use concat is creating URLs like this

.

With the contains function we are not told what happens if the second string is zero length. It always returns true, which seems pretty odd to me, which, in turn, makes it something worthwhile to mention.
Also, I don't see any mention of one of XPath's weirdest quirks. Namely, if a item in a filter evaluation is a nodelist, that XPath has uses an ANY semantics. That is too say

//product[@price>$Specials/@price]
gives us products that are more expensive than any of the specials.
The fault here is with the Wrox editors, not the authors. Chapters 9 10 and 11 are also great.
A very worthwhile, nay, essential book for Microsoft technology.

Alas, the book is already slightly out of date as MS has released MSXML4 SP1.
You will need to add
oXMLResp.setProperty("NewParser", True) to various places in the code

This is really a good book but it is not a primary reference for XML, nor would you want to learn from scratch here. For these functions I recommend Professional XML by Anderson et.al. (currently mis-identified by Amazon as by Boumphrey et.al). The strength of this book is that St. Laurent really knows why things are the way they are in XML and how to use it effectively. He writes clearly and gives real good advice and insights. The examples are excellent, but it would have been nice to have more of them. I read this book cover-to-cover and enjoyed it.

We used this book as the basis for a quick class on XML here at work. Of all the XML books we have reviewed for this class this book follow the XML 3W commettes standard 1.0 the closest of any of them.It is clear and consise with good examples given through out. It does a good job pointing up problems with non validating parseing tools too.

I am new to HTML/XHTML and wanted a definitive reference book that told me about EVERY HTML tag - and exactly what were and weren't the correct ways to use them. After buying and reading about 5 other similar books, I finally got to this one and it is exactly right. All the other books cover useful snippets here and there, but they aren't exhaustive.

Note that this book isn't good for learning the basics. Rather, it is useful reference once you know the basics and need a source that tells you authoritatively that this such and such tag (e.g., 'p') does or doesn't support such and such attribute (e.g., 'padding') - fyi, it doesn't, except thru the 'style' attribute.

If that's what you need, then this is what you should buy.

AMAZON, SHAME ON YOU!!!!! You should state what edition and the date copyrighted in the book information and indicate whether there are newer editions.

Watch out. Though Amazon has it covered by the "look inside", the book entitled only HTML is the 3rd edition of a book that is in it's sixth Edition. Amazon has combined all the reviews for all the editions. This should not be done!!!!!!! I have always felt comfortable buying from Amazon, no longer. I did have a seller (ordered through Amazon)send me this edition for the full price of the 6th. He got the sixth to me, but it took my time to get it corrected. The 3rd edition is probably not even worth the $10 for the used edition, but is certainly not worth the $20 for the new. Don't be fooled! I can't believe Amazon is stooping to this sort of a con. The most serious problem is that much of what you learn in this edition is being put out to pasture in the next 5 years.


There is a World Wide Consortium that is trying to standardize language and browswers. HTML is being replace in the interim with XHTML and eventually XML. A new, more powerful, formating language, CSS, Cascading Style Sheets, is replacing any formating in HTML.

Many of the reviews you see are for the 6th edition. It does have errors (it doesn't stick to the more stringent XHTML as it should, and the redundancy is annoying. Castro's is annoying in that she sectionalizes the code and it's not clear at first what she's doing. I haven't yet seen the others that are offered.

Don't make the mistake of thinking this book will teach you how to code web pages using HTML and CSS. This is a reference manual that exhaustively discusses the mechanics of coding web pages, but it doesn't walk you through the process step by step. For that, I recommend O'Reilly's "Head First: HTML with CSS & XHTML." The benefit of this book is that it covers every aspect of HTML and CSS, including some which the W3 consortium has approved but no browser yet supports. It's best as a reference book for those already familiar with web page coding. It's full of surprises and "I didn't know I could do that!" moments, given its comprehensiveness.

I have the 3rd edition and use it most everyday in my job. I figured it would be a bit outdated so I bought this latest version. The new version is essentially the exact same as the old version and I feel like I wasted my money. It's also missing the handy quick reference the older version had. However, if you don't have an earlier version, I would definitely recommend it. It's indispensable.

I wanted a complete reference & guide to html/xhtml and that's what I got. I didn't want to be ignorant about any features. I didn't want to be left in the dark about anything. This book has all the info I wanted, and much more. In fact in a way it has too much info. It has info about tags, attributes, and other features that are obsolete, deprecated, or not supported by any browsers. You can skip over those rather than slogging your way through every word in the book. Maybe it's just me, but one downside to this book for me is that the writing style tends to be convoluted, verbose, and somewhat boring. I had some difficulty staying focused and concentrating on this book. But since it fulfilled the reason I got this book, I still give it 5 stars. So if you're looking for a complete book, don't worry, it's complete.

Note that there are at least 3 editions of this book. Check for the latest edition if you want the latest.

This book is not an explanation or tutorial of how to make beautiful pages with CSS. I think the people who give it below 3 stars may have been looking for that, and instead they should try CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions. This book IS, however, a complete reference to all CSS properties and values, and also contains some valuable tips on browser behavior and bugs. If I'm coding along and forget what all the possible values are for list-style-type, this is the book I reach for.

This is the 'go-to' reference for me. The truly ultimate guide to CSS from one of the construct's primary innovators and authors. Mr. Meyer is the most knowledgeable person in the field of CSS, browser compatibility and all around HTML design.

I had done some work with style sheets, but was confused bythe terms and had no idea what they can do. This book completely changed what I can do when I design web sites. It'sa real eye-opener and a great reference.

Probably a bit out of date at this point. For me, this book wasn't that useful, since I generally refer to the W3C site for information about CSS. But it's a nice desk reference, and a standard tool for almost all CSS developers. There's probably a new version out by now to address all the developments that have happened in the past couple of years, I would look for that (or wait until one comes out, it won't be long).

Just as any good large technical book should do, this gives a pretty good reference of all the basic controls and how to perform basic operations. This is also it's only fault, as it spends a lot of time on the simple controls, and not enough time on the more complex concepts.

It's good for reference though, as it does contain a good amount of content to do most anything in ASP. This title is good for the beginner ASP as it covers simple to complex tasks fairly thoroughly. After you've absorbed most of this book, you might find yourself looking for more, and I've mostly found Google useful to add-in the pieces missing from this book. Overall I recommend this for any ASP guru who needs a refresher every now and then.

I am a big fan of Jesse Liberty books and rate him as one of the best and more experienced tech writers around, but this book is definitely not up to his excellent standard. To be more precise, the book starts out very well, with and introduction to the basic control of ASP.NET illustrated by many clear examples, and the only complaint I have about the first part of the book is that I would have loved to see the two chapters that he devote to webapp structure and configuration right at the start of the book. I think it would have given a clear picture of what one is doing with all those pages and controls and why things are the way they are. The second part of the book is where I was expecting to find more complete and advanced examples on how to build and configure a "real - life " web application, but here is where the book fails miserably. The chapters on ADO can be defined as confusing at best, and the remaining chapters are either a sequence of instructions fitter more to a "build a website visually for dummies" title, or missing crucial information. I have been also very annoyed by the organization of the example code. Every, and I say every example is in the format of a single website, and to make things worse these websites are not organized by chapter number but just by name.
It really looks like the kind of book a smart and experienced tech author could write after studying the documentation throughly but having no real experience with the subject in practice. I think I understand why.. even I find myself more interested in the foundations of a technology on language structure and on general CS subjects than in the structure of the Nth API or Framwork, but still I don't go about writing books on them!
So, a somewhat decent book, especially considering the low general quality standard of ASP books, but nothing to be enthusiastic about.

This book is a C# book. The reviews here, along with Amazon's own review, are referring to one of the previous editions where VB.NET code samples were included.

When deciding to buy this book, or not, be wary of the reviews that were posted before the publication date. I can see that this situation has already caused others some grief.

A good book to use both as a learning guide, and as a reference. Though some of the code examples could have been tightened up a little bit, they do a nice job of starting at the very bottom/core of ASP and working their way up -- teaching you how to use ASP to create quality applications instead of glue and popsickle stick nightmares.

[...]This edition has no VB.NET code and assumes knowledge of C#. All the examples are in that language.

I bought it because of positive reviews and publishers description that stated the book had all examples in both languages,[...].

It may be a fine book for those who know C#

This book was an impulse buy at a local computer show. Don't do that. After I got home and had a chance to thoroughly review the content, I discovered that--there really wasn't much content. Basically, the book is an organized collection of pre-built ASP services for automating common tasks, such as usage tracking, personalization, and various company intranet and human resources tracking tasks. While the book contains a CD with all of the ASP code ready for you to customize, it does not include corresponding Microsoft Access databases to support the code. Since most of the services described within are dependent upon an RDBMS, the author/publisher should have a least included sample databases, so that working examples could be studied. That said, I have incorporated several of the ideas (but not necessarily the code) contained within the book into my own projects. This book is probably most useful for a beginner level ASP student looking for ideas and examples related to bringing a company's intranet services up to date. All others can find ample examples on various Internet sites.

I bought this book because the examples seemed very practical. However, I had a lot of trouble to make the examples work, actually I haven't been able to make them work. Some of the example files (Access Databases) are missing. I am in the beginning stage of learning ASP. I thought that since the author explains almost every line of code, I would be able to learn something. I was wrong. I had to go back to Amazon.com and buy two more books so I could have a background and then I will probably come back to this book again.

I am giving 3 stars because some of the examples in the book seemed to have not been tested before publishing.

The book shows you a couple of techniques. But the same techniques are applied over and over on the different scripts. Not all the techniques work. The INSERT or UPDATE SQL statements would not work if there are too many single and double quotes. For example, try using INSERT or UPDATE with text data like - Mr. O'Brien's girlfriend said, "Hi, it's me!". The quotes and single quotes would really mess up any SQL statement. Also, you have to change the connect string to use Microsoft Access, a fact not mentioned in my copy of the book / CD.

I have mixed feelings about this book.

It's well written and relatively easy to follow. I particularly liked the authors presentation of 'Database Server Components' end of the second chapter.

HOWEVER, the ACCESS databases on the CD must have been 'slapped together' at the last minute!

*Some tables are completely missing!
*Relationships haven't been mapped!
etc...

In all fairness I didn't try to execute the SQL Server scripts, I had a big enough headache with ACCESS.

Buyer beware....

I recommend this book to anyone trying to figure what ASP script is all about and how to apply it to business related applications. BUT, (and this is a huge WARNING) don't think that the CODE supplied in this book is going to help you because it WON'T. I've tried half of the code, thinking I was up for moderate twinking and modification (I'm an Intermediate ASP Writer), and it turns out this code wouldn't work if Greg Buczek was standing there infront of you! ....I've found plenty of scripts from other ASP books and online sites that have worked great...

I haven' read the book, only browsed its TOC. It doesn't cover the Document Object Model (DOM) and the Simple API for XML (SAX). It also discusses CSS in too much detail. These days, web development professionals will probably have a knowledge of both HTML and CSS before starting with XML.

Consider "Beginning XML" or "Professional XML" instead, both published by Wrow.

When I first saw this book I thought that someone must be kidding. There's no question that XML is clearly the language to use when you want to transfer data using the standard web communications protocols. But a book that's more than a thousand pages, get serious.

They I opened it, low and behold, links, style sheets, specialized forms of XML for specialized purposes that have been agreed upon by multiple competing companies. It turns out that there's a lot more to XML than I thought.

Then in conjunction with XML other languages have been developed, some have proved not so useful and have faded away, others have evolved and changed to be more useful.

All in all, this is a very useful book, well written and has given me some ideas about how to solve some problems. That's all you can ask out of a book.

I bought Harold's book to help me move from XHTML to XML and to handle data with PHP which does not fit well in a relational database / SQL. This book bogs down quickly in very long explanations & examples which could have been a fraction of the size. I think it has good coverage, but Harold uses too many words every time he approaches a subject. To paraphrase someone else, Harold could write 10,000 words on the color red.

The problem with Wiley's Bible series (I have several of them) is that the goal seems to be to make them as big and heavy as a boat anchor. This results in verbose books, which may be ok for use as a reference but way to hard to read cover to cover for initial learning. The time needed to read these books cover to cover exceeds the value of the book itself. If you buy books by the pound (or kilo), this is a good buy. But if you value your time more than you value impressive size, there are better alternatives.

On a positive note: I have not found a bunch of typo or editing errors and Harold seems to know the subject. I'm just frustrated by the slow pace, although I will continue trying to read it at least a little longer.

Warning: [Some opinions given here appear to be by paid reviewers. ie: Feb 3, 2005, and others. How many others are also raw attempts to sell books without honor? Can you trust anyone who writes hundreds or thousands of 5 star opinions?? Heck no! Hint: Check out the person writing the review before actually reading it. Look for how many opinions he/she writes and how many stars. Distrust all high opinions in the first few months after publication, all high opinions by people who have only written a couple of opinions, and all high opinions from people who only write high opinions. Thanks for the lack of honesty Elliotte &/or Wiley &/or big A. (my opinion, 2 cma).]

I have purchased many books from Amazon, but this one is printed on the lowest-quality paper I've ever experienced. Though it's relatively new, the yellowed pages look like a 1960's pulp novel. There is literally a 2mm yellow border surrounding each page. Come on "Hungry Minds" publishers, you can do better than this.

Review for XML 1.1 Bible (3rd Edition):

Elliotte Rusty Harold is that rare technical author who can write about anything and make it interesting. In this case, he has written 1,000 pages on XML providing us with an excellent guide book to this technology. Whether you are a beginner or advanced user of XML, there will be something in this book for you.

The book is divided into five parts. The first part discusses the basics of XML giving us an introduction to what XML is, what it is used for, and explaining the basics of creating a well-formed XML document. Part two discusses DTDs and explains how namespaces are used. Part three looks at various style languages including CSS and XSL. The section on CSS will be useful to anyone wishing to use CSS to format their HTML documents. Part four gives us a tour of some supplemental XML technologies including XLinks, XPointers, XInclude, and Schemas. The chapter that most interested me was on Schemas and the explanations were clear and complete, leaving no mystery about how to use this technology. The final part looks at a few XML applications including XHTML, RDDL, and SVG. The book does not cover writing programs to process XML documents using SAX or DOM, for example. The author has another book on that topic if that is of interest to you.

Each part of the book does an exceptional job of explaining the topic. The author gives us plenty of examples to make the text crystal clear. The author writes as a colleague helping out fellow programmers and not as an instructor droning away at a blackboard. You really get the idea that the author enjoys XML and enjoys explaining it. If you are interested in working with XML this book is truly an indispensable guide.

This book not only offers the most incisive portrait of Jordan, the Bulls championship years, and the NBA of that era, but is also wonderful Halberstam, who tells the story with an epic sweep. Simply a beautiful work from cover to cover.

Nike turned Michael Jordan into a dream. Nike funneled in 1984 all of Nike's advertising resources in one player instead of in several teams. Nike made Michal Jordan a cultural icon and featured him as a star amidst other entertainment stars. And in the beginning Jordan didn't even like Nike sneakers. He preferred Adidas. Ultimately Nike paid Jordan in roughly 1 million dollars a year for five years. In 1984 no one realized that Nike was getting one of the great bargains of the time. Nike was a shoe company in great trouble. Michael Jordan saved Nike by his appeal to the youth. In the mean time basketball benefited from satellite reception that was just opening the world of cable television. Satellite reception facilitated cheap broadcasting. Bill Rasmussen obtained channel space on a communications satellite. His ESPN opened new broadcasting opportunities for basketball. In Playing for Keeps David Halberstam tells the tale of Michael Jordan in the broader cultural context. In this book Halberstam displays his usual journalistic skills. But somehow I missed the emotional involvement of his other books. The Summer of 49 and The Breaks of the Game learned me more about the relevance of sports.

Luuk Oost

As someone very familiar with Michael Jordan's career I was startled by all the new bits of information crammed in this book. Its clear Halbertstam did his homework. He employed an exhaustive interview process that yields so many new anecdotes and perspectives of Michael Jordans career. I particulary enjoyed all the stories of Jordan showing flashes of greatness early on while being recruited by North Carolina. The book makes it clear that even at those early stages while no one could predict what was to come, those around Michael had never seen anything like him.

Halbertstam also reveals the background story for many of those surrounding Jordan during his run with the Bulls. Namely Phil Jackson, Scottie Pippen, Dennis Rodman, Jerry Krause, Jerry Reinsdorf, and others. He delves into their lives, paints a picture of their character, and allows you to understand what motivated all these contrasting personalities along the way.

It must be noted that the writing of David Halbertstam is just incredible. If you're a fan of Michael Jordan or just basketball this book is a must read. The subject could not be approached by a more accomplished author.

Halberstam does it again. With a keen eye and a knack for pulling the reader in, David Halberstam is one of our great modern writers. Just when you thought you knew Jordan, "Playing for Keeps" shades new light (not all of it flattering) on our greatest modern basketball player.

Well worth it.

I'm not a big Halberstam fan, and this book didn't change that opinion.

The subtitular "world that he [Jordan] made" is never really explored in any depth, and this is a surface-skimming bio of Jordan with the addition of some mini-bios on major figures in his life (David Falk, Dean Smith, Phil Jackson, etc.).

The research is limited and insight is scant as Halberstam leans heavily on material already published, pulling entire sections of the book (e.g., his thumbnail bio of Jackson) from the subject's own earlier book. He returns to quote the same two or three sports writers time and again (Sam Smith - Chicago Trib and Jordan biographer - OK, but Bob Ryan - Boston Globe - a dozen quotes???).

"Playing for Keeps" is a fast-reading Jordan sketch, a 400 page magazine article, during which Halberstam defers to Jordan too frequently: no real examination of the gambling, glossed over recount of James Jordan's murder, no meaningful exploration of Jordan the global commercial icon.

For my taste, this book is another disppointment from Halberstam.

Looking for the latest DHTML tricks and Javascript libraries? You came to the wrong place: this was published in 2005.

But I really liked this book. All you need is competence with HTML, CSS and Javascript, and Ajax in Action will help you understand what makes Ajax different from the traditional client-server architecture of web apps. It also introduces some design patterns and other basic considerations, e.g. cross browser issues. The second half of the book has several examples that illustrate what Ajax can buy you.

If you're already doing Ajax, there's not likely to be much here of any practical value, and a lot of the basic issues have been finessed away with the more common Javascript libraries. But if you're looking for a higher-level overview of the principles of Ajax and the issues involved in delivering the Ajax experience across browsers, this is still very relevant.

Reading Ajax in Action is not going to make you an expert. But this (or something like Head Rush Ajax) is a very good introduction.

I've bought the portuguese version of this book (AJAX em Ação), and I agree that it was incorrectly named.
I have a good experience with AJAX, and I was looking for an "AJAX bible", with hacks and something like this... but, like other people here, I am disappointed.
The book is excellent as a guide for project patterns that can be applied not just to AJAX, but to any web project. But the title, "AJAX in Action", suggest another type of content.

i am very interested in AJAX learn and this book is essential for any person that work in the web, how web developer, web desginer and others. you can learn the structure and the metodology about AJAX and JavaScript too. It is great and interesting

Spent a lot of time discussing non-Ajax related information - Patterns, best practices, Javascript OO. All of this is valuable (especially the latter, which few actually use prior to Ajax). The Ajax examples that were included had a lot of plumbing required (and provided) which is nice for re-usability, but misses the mark if you want to grow your understanding by starting easy and progressing to more complex examples.

It's amazing how much the JavaScript world has changed.

This book has a relaxing style, and it was enjoyable to read. However, it no longer represents what I think of as "modern" JavaScript. For instance, it doesn't cover closures until appendix B, and even then it tells the reader to avoid them. These days, having studied Dojo, jQuery, and Douglas Crockford's videos, it's clear that closures are at the heart of how modern JavaScript is written.

The copyright for this book is 2006, yet the index doesn't even mention Firebug, YUI, dojo, or jQuery which are now staples of the JavaScript community. Although, dojo is at least mentioned in the list of Ajax frameworks and libraries.

This book is an interesting piece of the history of JavaScript, but for those wanting to learn modern JavaScript, I recommend watching Douglas Crockford's videos instead.

The book came fast and was in good condition. The price was really cheap too.

This book though perhaps has many errors, it is still one of the best concept books out there. This will really get you started with XML smoothly. Some of the XML standards are rather complex, and I find this to be the most palatable material for understanding stuff like XSD and XSLT.

The book covers the basics of XML, how to define your XML schema through DTD, and then several chapters on XSD ("XML Schema and Namespaces") that include simple and complex types. The book follows up with XSML, usage of XPath and text expressions. Later there's coverage of cascading style sheets, XLink and XPointer.

I think there should be a newer version that will make corrections and update the material. I would love a chapter on RELAX-NG, as this is becoming popular to define schema for XML in some circles.

Overall, this is great book to get you started, and I would highly recommend this book as a quick spring board in the world of XML.

Admittedly, I'm only up to the second chapter in this book, but it's clear that Castro needed a better editor. She relies on a frustrating "Type this, then we'll come back to it later" approach (example: naming your DTD, then finding out four pages later HOW to apply that information). Disappointing as her XHTML + CSS and Flash MX books were much tighter in execution.

37 errors are listed on the author's site. I think I found some new ones as well. The material moves from the specific to general, so that the reader must skip around quite a bit. The aforementioned errors make learning XML very tedious and frustrating. An edit should have done - it is apparent none was. I have used Castro's books in the past and have never experienced the problems I have with this one. I recommend against purchasing this book and I hope Peachpit will not repeat the problems encountered within.

This book does cram a whole lot of information into a tiny space. I will say that, if you are interested in getting started with XML, the book tries to include all the "pieces" you need - like not just XML code, but DTDs and XSLT, etc.

However, the section on XSLT is seriously lacking. I worked on trying to make a VERY BASIC stylesheet yesterday and have yet to get one working. (I'm not new to programming either.) The book gives a lot of "do this, do that" examples, but without explaining the concepts of XSLT more completely and logically, it doesn't really equip you to go out and write stylesheets yourself. I'm disappointed.