Markup Languages Books

I teach many eBay classes and this book will be a definite recommendation to learn to use HTML to improve their listings. Very basic as it needs to be.

The presentation of the material in this book is excellent. It has the look and feal of a modern school textbook and is very easy to follow. The illustrations and screen shots are great.

The focus of the book is on presentation of listings (it is about HTML!). Topics covered include setting up photos, clipping images, and the use of video/animation and sound. From a personal perspective the latter two are annoying in most instances.

Following the book will result in well presented listings. Advice on actual content (wording)is limited. Much of the content is covered off in ebay hacks, albiet lacking the same level of illustration.

If you are familiar with HTML the book won't give you anything new. Cover price of $19.95 may make it slow to get your money back off this book. There are more useful books (driving ebay traffic, ebay hacks).

I'm not great with HTML but I don't think it will be much better as a result of this book (although ebay stores are covered it does not detail how to structure companion sites).

Example from my homepage:
http://mysite.verizon.net/vze48sdz/id1.html

If you have no HTML experience, don't like getting into technical details and want a very user friendly guide, this book is a very soft introduction.

Very readable and technically very accurate.

Starts off quite simply (first few chapter very easy to understand) then get's moving quickly by building a WAP/WML application step by step.

Does a good job job explaining

- WAP Architecture - Differences between a PDA's User Agent and an Emulaor (MicroBrowser) used on a PC - Differemces (to some degree) beteeen the WAP SDK's so users are not confused when their screens look a bit different to the ones in the book.

Also lists some very excellent products to use, such as Emulators, SDK's, XML and WML Editors etc.

For example, lists

- simple but very easy to use Klondike Freeware WML Emulator (but has no WMLScript support in current version ...).

- M3 Gate Emulator suggested is the best available. Great product

- HAs a Sybex branded version of a nifty little WML Editor called "WaPPLE" (great name) which is also FREEWARE - a nice personal touch. Very simple to use WML Editor will all WML Tags, Syntax Coloring etc like HTML Editors HTMLEditPro or HomeSite, - but easier to use

- Suggests OPera as a possible dual HTML and WML Browser, but in my experiance Opera 5 still a few tweaks yet to work perfectly with WML, but never-the-less a good suggestion.

Overall a good book - and not too expensive unlike others.

Very readable and technically very accurate.

Starts off quite simply (first few chapter very easy to understand) then get's moving quickly by building a WAP/WML application step by step.

Does a good job job explaining

- WAP Architecture - Differences between a PDA's User Agent and an Emulaor (MicroBrowser) used on a PC - Differemces (to some degree) beteeen the WAP SDK's so users are not confused when their screens look a bit different to the ones in the book.

Also lists some very excellent products to use, such as Emulators, SDK's, XML and WML Editors etc.

For example, lists

- simple but very easy to use Klondike Freeware WML Emulator (but has no WMLScript support in current version ...).

- M3 Gate Emulator suggested is the best available. Great product

- HAs a Sybex branded version of a nifty little WML Editor called "WaPPLE" (great name) which is also FREEWARE - a nice personal touch. Very simple to use WML Editor will all WML Tags, Syntax Coloring etc like HTML Editors HTMLEditPro or HomeSite, - but easier to use

- Suggests OPera as a possible dual HTML and WML Browser, but in my experiance Opera 5 still a few tweaks yet to work perfectly with WML, but never-the-less a good suggestion.

Overall a good book - and not too expensive unlike others.

I have not read the complete book, but it has given me answers and soloutions to all questions and problems I have so far been faced with. The book's ability to give straightforward, practical guiding to any problem, is for me as a fresh HTML-consumer rare and welcome in the jungle of HTML-related literature. It gives me inspiration and eager to go on!!

It's a good book for beginner to cover all basic idea and skills in differnet case. But for the advance user, it might be not enough and need to find other books. I cannot find some advance methods that I need in this book and also found some demo cases were not work as it said. But still it is a good book on hand.

This book covers it all. I just wish, as I am a novice to web design, that there were more real life examples to explain the elements. It was very technical and sometimes I got lost in the jargon.

I haven't got too far, it gives pleasant assignments and lab-projects to learn HTML. I am more interested in CSS and such, but haven't got too far into the book to see if this is covered. I bought this as a textbook for a class in HTML I am taking.

If You Know A fair amout about HTML and what to know more buy this book if u do know know much about html then i would recomend Dummies 101: HTML 4 This is a great book! buy! buy! buy!

I couldn't make heads or tails of this book, then I got HTML 4 For Dummies: Quick Reference. With HTML 4 For Dummies I was able to understand the basics of HTML better. With the basics down this book, More HTML For Dummies, made much more sense. I have been able to add several great items to my sites that I wouldn't have been able to without this book. Just be sure you understand HTML before buying this book.

HTML 4 nice and easily explaind without getting to technical.

I never had the time to actually learn any aspects of HTML. Although I still prefer WYSIWYG-editors, this book helped me quite a lot in thinking in HTML. The fact that it doesn't show much details is a pro. One drawback though: chapter 9 (on cascading style sheets) contains a significant number of typo's/miswrites/errors. Still a very decent piece of literature!

Great for beginners with lots of examples to get you there. Divided well into sections of increasing difficulty, so you can find the level that's right for you.

I liked the easy, leisurely approach to explaining the misteries of HTML and creating your Web SIte.

It explains with easy to follow examples all the important aspects and syntax of the current HTML standards.

With this book and a good editor you can start creating Web sites fast. Just enter your samples and view them immediately in your favorite browser, without even having to connect to the net.

Once you have them looking the way you want them, you can then publish in the net.

Highly recommended

XML seems to be on the mind of just about everyone who publishes information to the Internet. The big advantage is the ability to take content and publish it in various formats from a single source. As a general rule when you are talking about XML you are talking about using Java to implement it. AxKit gives the user the ability to publish XML documents using Perl. That means that you will have to have Perl installed to use it. Basically the prerequisites are an Apache server, the mod_perl Apache extension module, an XML parser written in Perl or in C with a Perl interface module, and the AxKit distribution. One you have all that put together and functioning you can start using the book to learn how to publish XML documents with AxKit. The actual techniques in the book are straightforward and well explained. If you are familiar with Perl there is nothing complex here, just a few different things to learn but nothing bizarre. With plenty of sample scripts so you can follow along and write your own following the examples XML Publishing with AxKit is a recommended read for people who are very familiar with Perl and want to get up and running with XML publishing with the minimum of effort.

Suppose you have a bunch of XML data. You want to offer it up on the web and your web server happens to be the most common one, Apache. Perhaps, as Hampton points out, you want to make the data available in various transformed ways - HTML, PDF or RTF, say, as these are very common formats. Each format needs a different operator to generate its output from your XML. Well, you may be in luck. Hampton suggests adopted AxKit as a way to do all this, fully compatible with Apache.

Along the way, he offers concise ways to use XSLT, XSP, RSS and stylesheets. In other words, he gives a motivating context in which to quickly learn the rudiments of these packages. Certainly not comprehensive in each. But this can be a blessing in disguise. For example, the full expressive power of XSLT grammar can be rather daunting to master. So his book also practises an informal but useful subtheme. He gives you a pragmatic minimum acquaintance with various subsidiary packages that are not AxKit itself. A useful extra benefit of the book.

If you are like most, your introduction to hypertext was when you used a browser for the first time. You saw how intuitive it was that links were visible on a web page, and how easy it was to click on a link and be taken anyplace else on the web. The great acceptance of the web and its browsers was due in no small part to the ease of use, and the ease of writing HTML pages.

Then after a few years, some deficiencies became apparent. HTML does not separate content from presentation. To do so, XML arose, with its user definable tags.

But XML, by itself, does not take the concept of linking beyond a link being a one way connection between a single source and a single destination. Yet the concept of hyperlinks is much broader and older than the web's instantiation, having been worked on in the 1960s by Nelson and Englebart.

This book expounds on how hyperlinks generalise the links in HTML. You can have multiple sources and multiple destinations. The links can be bidirectional. Given a destination, you can find the documents with sources that link to it. Currently, with web pages, you have to use a search engine to see who links to your pages. And no search engine reaches over 50% of the web.

The book describes the concept of a linkbase: a database of links. It can be stored separately from the underlying documents that it references. This lets you annotate a document without changing it! Imagine the possibilities. The document could be on a CDROM, or on someone else's website.

The implementation of these concepts is through XLink, XPath and XPointer. The authors use Backus-Naur Formalism to describe the grammar and they illustrate it with examples. My only quibble is that perhaps they could have written problem sets, for newcomers to cut their teeth on.

If you want to see a possible future direction of the Semantic Web, have a gander at this book.

I found that the author did a really good job in describing these technologies.

This book is written by two academic and it shows in so far as it is on the one hand a little more theoretical and abstract than most other computer book I read and on the other hand well informed by a large context.

The book starts by describing the different hypertext system that exist and existed alongside with the world wide web. In doing so they explain clearly how HTML linking model came into being and the deficiencies of this model.

The remainder of a book is in part a preview into the future of XML linking (where these technologies are going) as well as an explanation of Xpath, Xlink and Xpointer syntax.

As you probably know, Xlink is still a W3C working draft at this time. Xpointer is a W3C recommendation but neither xpointer, nor xlink have been largely implemented in the industry. This raise the question as to why would you read this book?

Personally I wanted to know where the linking model was going and I also wanted to understand the W3C working draft better. To a lesser extend, I was considering implementing these technologies.

My only objection to the book is its subtitle "A practical guide...". Practical is a relative term. This book gives very valuable pointers (no pun intended) for developpers wishing to implement these technologies but it does not give very practical down to earth examples. In some other web ressources, I found for instance some XSLT code to tranform Xlink into scripting languages that simulate the xlink functionality and to tell the truth I was expecting to find this kind of material here.

When I read this book, I was confused on how beneficial this book would be to me. The CD has a lot of shareware software, but it does not tell me where to find any freeware software. Lot of these software require that you have registered with the online services like CompuServe, America Online, etc. This book is hard to follow for people who are new to the web.