Markup Languages Books

It is the most colorful and most cutest book to own!!! Everything's fully explained.. Makes you want to explore further and eager to learn. I have gone through repeatedly. Simply LOVE this book !!! GRAB YOUR COPY NOW!!!

Two weeks ago I decided to re-work my company web sit. I ordered this book
and "Creating Web Pages with HTML". Creating came first and with it I was able to create a seven page site with pictures in under twelve hours.

Then came this book. There are three or four things in it that were not covered in "Creating" but "Creating" was much easier and simpler to follow and excecute. Creating did a much better job of taking it one step at a time, from the basic to the more complex in a more logical order.

I am far from an expert and this will probably get the job done for you even with out any previous html experience, but I would recommend "Creating" for its simplicity.

I bought this book back in 2002 to learn HTML and it was exactly what I was looking for. Easy to follow VISUAL instruction. After years of webpaging I STILL referance this book for quick easy to find reminders and brushing up. I recommend it to anyone, but especially those who know absolutely nothing about HTML nor where to begin.

When I am asked the question, "I want to learn programming, were should I begin?" my response is always, "learn HTML." While some people will legitimately argue that HTML is not true programming, it is easy to learn and the results are visual and immediate. The skills learned in the study of HTML are fundamental to more advanced programming and the ease of learning gives the beginner immediate and clear success.
This book is the easiest way to learn HTML that I have ever seen. With the illustrations all in full color, it is the epitome of What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG). Every step is set out in clear detail and all of the most commonly used features of HTML are covered. From this point on I will recommend it as my preferred first book in HTML.

The book is very helpful. The instructions are very clear and easy to follow.

The author does a great job summarizing common PHP characteristics and elaborating on PHP 5 improvements, with plenty of well-chosen code examples. Well suited for the established PHP programmer making the transition to PHP 5. For those starting out, use "Learning PHP 5" instead.

A very good choice. PHP5 is a new wave in dynamic web development. It dramaticly improved the handeling of classes and objects. This little book is your quick and easy to use refference of objects, methods, variables, scopes, functions. At Procreative Designs (procreative.ca), the company I work for this one was distributed all over our web development department at the beginning of last month. I personally find this book really handy and useful. Previously I owned PHP4 Refference and it always served me well. Overall its a great choice for quick refference.

I own a sizable collection of O'Reilly books and have found them to in general be very well written and useful. "Upgrading to PHP 5" continues this tradition superbly.

This book is _not_ for new PHP coders; the vast majority of the text assumes good familiarity with PHP 4.x. If you have this familiarity then you will find this book to be a thorough and well-organized primer on the many new features in the new PHP.

The first chapter merely lists the major areas that have changed in the latest PHP, each of which roughly corresponds to a chapter in the book.

Major enhancement to the OOP facilities of PHP are appropriately discussed in the next chapter. Unfortunately, this is probably the most clumsily written chapter due a strange desire to educate the reader in OOP basics (about the only place in the book where this mistake is committed). The result is a schism that imposes redundancy in the material while simultaneously making it unduly hard to locate specific topics.

Thankfully the subsequent two chapters (on the new MySQL interface and the SQLite database) are uniformly well-written. Especially useful is a (perhaps oddly-situated) section on migration strategies from a PHP 4/MySQL 4.0 platform to a PHP 5/MySQL 4.1 platform.

A chapter on XML follows, but I did not read it in great detail since my applications tend to not require it, so other reviewers are likely to provide greater insights here.

Iterators, yet another feature completely new to PHP 5, are covered next. Unlike much of the conventional PHP fare (even OOP) this topic really does require understanding of rather abstract concepts (especially when debugging the RecusrsiveIterator interface). For this reason, while clearly written it may take hobbiests some time to take this material to heart.

The new error-handling functions are introduced next. I think that the chapter could have benefited from a little more discussion; Trachtenberg seems to think providing code samples is almost self-explanatory. At the end of the day, though, the chapter does its job.

The chapter on streams and filters is another one that I barely perused, so I defer to other reviewers on this topic.

The penultimate chapter provides a very cursory evaluation of a handful of extensions to PHP. While certainly useful to the practicing PHP programmer they are covered in so brief a manner that you will need a separate text to implement them meaningfully. But this chapter does give enough information to at least evaluate the extensions' potential usefulness in an application.

Trachtenberg concludes with an example PHP application. I do not like such examples in books - between space limitations and the complexity of real life this and other examples feel too... contrived... to be worthwhile. But I understand that it is included practically as canon, and do not fault the author for its inclusion.

So, all things considered, this text covers the changes in PHP 5 in detail in a surprisingly brief 300 pages (and small page footprint). A worthy addition to a book collection, provided you already have general PHP reference available.

Being fairly proficient on PHP 4 but looking for more info on version 5, the idea of getting books on PHP 5 that, once again, starts from scratch wasn't exciting at all. This book instead was exactly what I needed, it assume you know PHP 4 and covers only the new features with a good amount of details and a bunch of useful suggestions for code migration. The only reason I don't give it 5 stars is that in the chapters covering OOP and DOM the author try to explain the new functionalities but also attempt to throw in the mix more generic info on this two topics. The end results are somewhat mixed, the coverage of PHP 5 is, in my opinion, very good, but the material about OOP and DOM instead aren't up to the rest and does more harm than good.

This is a fantastic book. I frequently find that when an existing developer buys a book, he/she has to sort through all the garbage review in the beginning. This book assumes you are a competent PHP4 programmer. Then it takes you step by step through new PHP5 syntax and features that are unique to PHP5. It reviews and explains Object Oriented Programming (OOP), then discusses a variety of PHP5-only concepts, like SimpleXML and SQLite.

I recently installed a PHP5 server and this book has been by my side since. All PHP4 developers who expect to use PHP5 within the next year or so should really have a copy of this book handy.

Every now and then, a book comes along that I feel deserves 5 stars. This is one of those books. This book targets the intermediate Visual Basic.Net developer but someone trying to learn Visual Basic.Net, ASP.Net, ADO.Net, or XML will find that this book is easy to read. Chapters 1 through 10 cover ASP.Net, Chapter 11 covers XML, and Chapter 12 covers ADO.Net. At the end of several chapters, the authors provide a mini-reference. For example, at the end of chapter 11, there is a mini-reference on XML. I use these mini-references on a daily basis. In each chapter the authors have ample examples. The amazing thing is that they all work. I followed every example and with a minor exception of 1 example in the XML Chapter, all of the examples worked. The one exception just required some minor adjustments (using the XML indentation method). This is my first book by Jeffery P. McManus and Chris Kinsman but it won't be the last. I plan to buy their equivalent book on C#. I would also buy any "advanced" books that the authors write.

Pros: Easy to read, ample examples that work, and mini-references at the end of the chapters.

Cons: I would like to see more illustrations in the book.

This book is definitely a "Buy".

This book is very easy to read, and the examples in the book are all easy to follow. It provides enough information for people who are new to .NET and those who need a reference tool. The book has a good background on Visual Basic .NET, ASP.NET, XML, and ADO.NET. Very easy to understand.

Chapter 2 provides good information for migrating from ASP to ASP.NET. It helps ASP 3.0 developers understand the differences between ASP 3.0 and ASP.NET and what needs to be changed. This book also discusses the general idea of Web Services, XML and ADO.NET with very simple examples. Having this makes it very helpful in understanding the corrolation of all the .NET features. You may want to pick up other books if you want to know more about these topics. I was able to use some of the examples in my development work, the examples are very nicely written and very well explained. This book, as is, can be a good tool for both learning .NET and used as a reference in future development work. I recommend the book. ---Reviewed by Annie W.

I would recommend this book for those VB/ASP developers who wish to get a basic guide to migrating to the new .NET technology. It does assume some previous knowledge of ASP development. It is useful as a handy reference for major features of .NET ASP development. I would not recommend it for those just getting started with ASP.NET.

The book is well organized for the amount of subject matter covered. I found it somewhat daunting at first, since the author gets right into the new features of ASP.NET without a lot of background and foundation theory. Some may find this cutting to the chase as a feature, but the subject of migration is no small task.

Going on to the page framework and configuration chapters, however provided a more rewarding journey. The book provides some basic knowledge needed for configuring and deploying an ASP application. This is an important topic that many books do not cover as thoroughly.

The coverage of Web services is quite sufficient to get one started on their way to developing web service based applications. The code examples are well organized and easy to navigate and relate well to illustrate the text. The book is not, however a guide on style or technique - you'll need to develop that elsewhere.

The sections on XML and ADO.NET are enough to get started with a good understanding of how these topics are so importantly tied into ASP.NET applications.

Overall, the authors provide a great deal of detailed information without a lot of unnecessary verbiage. The book makes a reasonably good reference worth keeping at hand. -- Reviewed by Richard S.

As an experienced VB and ASP developer, I have spent the last year trying to make some progress in developing ASP.NET applications. 5-6 book purchases helped, but I never could really get the hang of it, until I got this book. After a very enjoyable time reading this book, and working through the examples, I am now going back through the other books, getting much more understanding from them.

It's hard for me to say why this book proved to be so much more helpful, but it did. Jeffrey McManus is a good speaker and author, and this is the first book I've read from Chris Kinsman. Maybe it's their language that helped me, maybe it was the subjects they chose to spend time on, but one way or another, this book opened the floodgates for me.

A couple of things I can definitely say that I found to be head and shoulders above other books are:

1) Lack of errors/typos, etc. I'm not saying there aren't any, but this book definitely was not one of those that make it harder to learn simply because you think what you are reading is right, and it isn't. I had zero problems like that.

2) Easy to follow code examples. So many books I've read make their examples too complex, expecting that you know everything that they are doing except for the one narrow thing they are trying to teach you. Like using regular expressions to validate email addresses before you save them to the database, and this in an example of "how to save to the database." This book has none of that junk. Each example cuts to the core of what it is trying to show you, and makes sure to explain it all, step by step.

I can't wait for these guys to team up again.

This book is good for beginners and mid level .NET developers; it can also be used as a reference, too. It is concise and it contains complete examples (hello W...). The author does not assume that you have VS.NET, which can be a plus for some.

I have other books written by Jeffery McManus. This book is just as good. I would like to see more books written by this author but on the advance side, for those who mainly use VS.NET as their development environment.

Very great book, I learned so quickly and throughoghly. I'm reccomending this book to everyone who wants to learn CSS. It's worth the money, not only as a learning tool, but as a quick reference. Really, im not joking, buy this book!

This book was quite well laid out, and will quickly get you up to speed in understanding and using cascading style sheets. Not in-depth, but very good for an introduction. Could concentrate a bit more on cross-browser compatibility, but well above the standard fare.

The ten minute series provides an excellent way to quickly utilize todays standards and software. That trend continues here

Not sure where "10 minute guide" came from, nor the note on the cover "Embed style sheets with the Active X Control Pad," but nonetheless a good overview of style sheets for those comfortable with HTML.

The main things that I like about this book is that it is small, light-weight, and easy to find things in. I carry it in my briefcase, so that I can use it at home, as well as at the office. There is nothing so far that I have needed to know the syntax of that I haven't found right away in Hip Pocket Guide. It is not a thorough, in-depth reference to HTML, but it is just the thing when you can't remember the format or allowable attributes of an HTML tag.

I will be purchasing the HTML 4.0 version.

Good indexes and some accurate guidance. Mostly it is great. The authors seem to be more familliar with the extensions from Microsoft than Netscape. It seems somewhat incomplete for example: Netscape 3.0+ supports WIDTH and HEIGHT attributes of INPUT TYPE=Image and can scope FONT around H3 and OL neither of these are listed.

Rather than haul around some massive tome on web page authoring, get this handy spiral-bound guide to all the popular supported HTML tags. They're all listed alphabetically with syntax and rules. Navigator- and IE-specific information is clearly identified. I use Microsoft Front Page to develop the initial drafts of my pages, and then use this book to clean out the extra garbage so that both Navigator and IE users can use them. This book is a good value for programmers.

The guide is very well laid out with simple examples and do's and dont for each html tag. Nice for people who have just a little experience and still very useful for the advance htmler.

This book is a great help for Webmaster and Internet application developer. This book is easy to use and easy to understand (the great help for it are many samples).

The only thing what lack's this book is the notes for every tag or function about the browser. Because we all know, that some tags and functions we use only for MSIE and some only for NN. This is a little bit confusing to try run on NN a tag, what should be used only for MSIE.

I was walking out of the book store the other day and I hadn't found a reference book for HTML...I was disappointed. Just before I hit the door this book caught my eye sitting on a web-development display. I picked it up (hefty book!) and thumbed through it...WOW! Not only does it cover HTML, but it also covers Cascading Style Sheets, DHTML, XML and MathML. You won't find examples for every entry (that would probably add a few thousand more pages) but at least you will have a reference/cross-reference to declarations, methods, elements, concepts, and just about any other tiny morsel of you could imagine.

This reference is certainly one of the best available. The author includes a CD with examples from the book, however the sample pages are very juvenile and difficult to look at. These pages are almost insulting to a professional Web designer. But, if you don't get hung up on the poor quality of the CD, the book itself is well written and complete, although I would like to see more short examples of syntax and usage for every tag. If I knew how to apply the tag, I would not be looking it up.

Such a great book! Alphabetically listed HTML tags and cross references make finding whatever you need so easy!

This book was rather hard to understand. In order to use it, it assumed you knew all VBscript, alot of CSS, and some JavaScript. The web address's for downloading the source code are obsolete, and it's just plain hard to understand. Not that I have anything against DHTML, except the person who wrote assumes you are a seasoned programmer who knows how and why you pre-declare variables, fetch properties and methods, have CSS down pat, ad infitum. Sic. By the way, I am really 13.

I've been creating web pages for about a year and a half. I heard about DHTML, and I wanted to learn it.
Suffice it to say that my second Wrox book was almost as good as the flawless first. I reccomend it for any webmaster with a solid grasp of HTML and a basic knowledge of either JavaScript to VBScript. The clear, concise explanations assume you have no real expereince with DHTML (such as in my case), so it's explained quite well.

BUY IT!

This is a great book. The samples are clear, easy to follow and give you something that you can use in your web development. The last half of the book is a great reference section that I use a lot. It covered the subject very well at the beginner and intermediate level. But, it left me looking for more as I discovered just how powerful DHTML really is.

This book is certainly well done, especially for it's smaller format. A few things should be noted, the most important of which is that you should have prior knowledge of both HTML 3.x and some knowledge of scripting. With out these mental tools, I could easily see how someone could get confused by this book. For anyone intermediate or above though, this book will quickly get you up to speed on IE4 DHTML with clear lessons on the basics, and a fantastic reference. My only complaints really is that the scripting was done in VBScript, not JavaScript.

This book is a good learning practice to vb.net/.NET. I have read other book, but too much introduction.

I follow through all the example in this book and type it up myself.

I really recommended this book to user with experience in programming and want to go straight into coding.

Author Well Done.!

I'm currently studying for 70-310 exam and will comments on it when I have finish the exam.

I used this book and Gunderloy's 70-310 book. This book alone will not help you pass the test, but it is worth the price for 2 whole practice tests and over a 100 chapter-end questions.

I will suggest this book to everyone who want to pass and study for the exam quickly. I have been reading this book and I found that this book is really easy to read and has a good depth. It is a "to the points" type of book, and doesn't give me too much unnecessary information like normally other book does.

I passed 70-310 by using this book and the Transcender practice tests. For me, the Transcender tests filled in some gaps in the material that this book didn't touch on or didn't touch on in great detail.

I like the Exam Cram series because I find them easy to read. Most of the chapters are short (10 - 20 pages), easily digestible pieces, which I prefer. I also appreciated the programming examples in this book, since they allowed me to get some practice creating projects and writing code. I could use the Visual Studio .NET help system to look at the class members and answer any curious-type questions I had. If you learn better by working on hand-on examples, you'll appreciate them too.

If you are new to Visual Basic and object oriented programming, do not buy this one right away. Learn more about VB.NET first and then buy this book to pass the test. If you are a seasoned programmer with VB experience, get it along with practice tests. I can recommend Transcender, but then again, those are the only kind I have used.

Good luck on the exam!

I tried learning RELAX NG by looking at a few HOWTOs, but there was clearly a lot more to it than what they presented. This book is clear, detailed, and the verbose examples are very helpful.

This is a solid work on Relax NG. The text is very thorough and the author obviously knows what he is talking about. On it's face that makes this a must have book for NG users.

It's not without it's flaws however. The graphics are poor and there could be more done to impart how the Relax NG specifications relate to the specific XML examples they are validating. In addition the book provides little information about tools and support for NG, and also neglects to relate NG to any of the other XML validation standards (DTD, XML Schema.)

For a book about a tough subject it does a lot in a small space. For someone looking for information about NG who is going to apply it in the near term this is a fine work.

Years ago I attended an ASP Professional Developers conference in Washington, DC, and one of the most inspiring lectures was by a Microsoft XML evangelizer who claimed "It's all about the schema". He might have been right, but on practical level, the transition between XML 1.0 DTDs and W3C XML Schema has been neither easy nor intuitive.

The emergence of RELAX NG is a testimony of the power of the open source movement. While admitting the need for standards (and recommendations) it was obvious that the powerful XML Schema would benefit from the ease of DTDs. RELAX NG is the answer to that need.

The book by the same name by Eric van der Vlist provides not only a description of what RELAX NG is and where it fits in the XML universe, but also guides you through a list of techniques, best practices and integration ideas.

For those among us who are not XML gurus, a book like this can be eye-opening because let's face it, you do not hear about RELAX NG outside of the XML community.

O'Reilly has been very good about publishing thorough books on emerging topics and this book is not an exception. It manages to inform yet not overwhelm. What more can you expect from a computer book?

By now, XML is entrenched as the most common and flexible standard for data interchange. There is no real dispute over this. But in the quick uptake of XML, the DTDs rapidly showed their shortcomings. So a more expressive schematic standard was hurriedly put together, under the generic name of XML Schema.

But, as van der List points out, some users took issue with the complexity and verbosity of XML Schema. An alternative emerged, Relax NG, which is described in detail here. The author's assessment that Relax is in fact cleaner and simpler to use than XML Schema seems correct. I cannot find technical flaws in his argument.

There are two problems, though. XML Schema has greater acceptance. Certainly aided by the very generic and definitive nature of its name. While this may not be quantifiable, it certainly does not help Relax. For example, think of "Microsoft Windows". In common parlance, this is elided to "Windows". So if you say the latter, in referring to any computer GUI, some might assume you mean the Microsoft version. Very aggravating! There is some of this going on here.

The other problem is that both approaches have essentially the same functionality. While there may be some things you can do in Relax that are not possible in the other, this may not be enough. Ditto for the simpler syntax of Relax.

Remember IBM's OS/2 versus Microsoft Windows? Most observers with no pony in that race gave an overall technical advantage to OS/2. But it was driven to extinction. A similar fate might befall Relax.

I like the book as it is easy and covers most of my basic HTML needs. Of course the title is misleading, since any book can be read chapter by chapter dedicating ten minutes each, but I never expected to learn HTML in ten minutes anyway. AdventureImagery.com

I love this book as an intro, but there were a few typos that tripped me up as I followed the examples: for instance, the linked styles tag on page 44 is missing the slash at the end, so it should read ".../css"/>" instead of ".../css">". Also, the screen shots are rather small and hard to read. Otherwise it's a great book, very lean and clear, with references to useful websites.

This is a great guide, i personally learned a lot from this book. It was very sensible and made sense, organized in a great way so you can find things quickly.

This book does exactly what it says -- it gives you little 10 minute lessons into HTML, XHTML, and CSS. If you want to delve in deep, you'll have to get some more comprehensive books.

The lessons are pretty straightforward and you'll be surprised (I was) on how the code can be slightly changed to meet your own specific needs. I now have a good basic understanding of HTML where before I had only a minimal understanding.

If nothing else, the book and appendices make a great quick reference guide. And the price is sure hard to beat.