Markup Languages Books

" I have NEVER read such an exceptional presentation of HTML as DDC's HTML Fundamentals. This Publication is superb! It's incredibly clear, concise, and logically sequenced with practical, jargon-free exercises." - Sandi Scanneli, Training Manager

The content of the book was easy to follow. I had no problem understanding the text or completing the exercises. My only problem with this book was that the some of the exercises in Units 5, 6, & 7 refer to student files not on the floppy disk that came with the book. I was able to manually recreate some files in order to complete the exercises. It was disappointing and frustrating, to say the least, not to have the corresponding files to go with the exercises in the manual. Perhaps I got an old floppy from a previous HTML course the published? Other than that, I enjoyed the tutorial.

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.

One of the best books available yet on Java, a standard popularised by Scott McNeally's Sun Microsystems.

The book obviously is not written by natural writers, but the honesty and the knowledge of subject is pretty obvious.

I browsed through this book at Borders and liked it a lot.
It appeared to be clearly written, fairly comprehensive, and nicely layed out.
I was mostly interested in the sections on web services with JAX-RPC.

After taking it home and spending a few hours with it, I took it back to Borders for a refund. The problem is, although it is copyrighted 2003, it already seems to be out of date. The JAX-RPC code walk-through depends on Sun's xrpcc tool. That tool is now deprecated, and no longer included in the Java Web Services Developers' Pack (JWSDP). Java is up to version 1.3 now, but this book is based on version 1.0.

O' Reilly's WEB SERVICES IN A NUTSHELL is written to a more recent version of the JWSDP (version 1.1, I think). However it is a much different sort of book, more of a reference than a "kickstart" tutorial. So I hope Chowdhury and Choudhary update their book, at least with some postings on the publisher's site (because I could not fiind an "update" or "errata" reference there).

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.

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.

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.

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.

HTML, as a language, is platform independent, so even though this book is put together by Macworld - a magazine for Macintosh users, there's a lot to learn from this book. The only problem is that the floppy disk that comes along with it is of no use to PC users, which means you'll miss out on the software and example files on the floppy.

Having spent over 15 years on the Internet, and designed hundreds of web pages himself, Dave Taylor goes beyond teaching you the nuts and bolts of HTML to show you how to design and create useful, attractive webpages, and then publicise these pages.

After the customary introduction to the Web and HTML, the book slowly slips in HTML tags, organised very logically (unlike the Dummies book that forced them all together). Learning HTML in this step-by-step manner is less overwhelming, and a pleasant learning experience. Each of the chapters introducing different HTML tags has an easy-to-refer summary table to help you refresh your memory.

When you're sufficiently comfortable creating bare-bone text-only pages, the book helps you spruce up your pages with graphics, photographs, audio, and video. All this, while reminding you (and showing you how to) keep those pages shell-account-friendly.

There's an entire chapter dedicated to discussing search engines, and teaching you how to register with some of them, so that you'll be able to use that knowledge to your advantage when you start publicising your pages. This is followed by other ways and means to announce your site to the world.

The book briefly touches upon the more advanced elements of webpages - forms, imagemaps, and CGI scripting. And for those who plan to design full - blown sites instead of just arbit. webpages, the book ends with a very useful step-by-step guide to planning the entire site. Dave has also put together a list of common HTML mistakes that he's committed or been victim to, and has shown how to avoid those mistakes.

Now if only this book was available with software for the PC...