Markup Languages Books

I received this book, hoping to get some inside clues on how SOAP is implemented in .NET. I was running into some more sophisticated needs. I found the book to be full of general fluff. E.g., at the beginning it brings this corny motivation for SOAP that it's a better way for web page scraping. It actually believes that SOAP was made to replace code opening yahoo financials pages, and scraping stock quotes out of it. Hello? SOAP works along EDI and Corba. It's a simplified version of both that makes it easier and language/platform independent for those cases that don't need the full functionality of EDI or Corba.

Well, then there is a quote, where the author blankly asserts that posts are more useful then gets. I'm familiar with the debate about the pros and cons. But, an author just asserting one is better and putting as a reason 'trust me, baby, I'm smart', is just so pretentious.

To put it plain from flipping around in the book, I didn't find any good information, and the author just disgusted me with his way of writing and assertions. This is a total utter waste of time and money.

Here's what you get in the book: you will learn how to use .NET in order to shape your SOAP messages. There's a lot to know and understand: manipulating XML, creating custom attributes, debugging, reading messages. This book covers all of those items in detail and has the code to save you time. The book tells me exactly what I needed to know in order to make better use of SOAP in my .NET applications. Kenn teaches this stuff for Wintellect and developed the course on this. It's also pretty clear that the day jobs for both these guys involves writing Web Services. When you are done with the book, you will understand all you need in order to write your own Web Services.

I read the two other reviews and I don't understand why the readers are complaining. SOAP is one way to do Web Services and is the only thing that the authors talk about in the entire book. Perhaps this reader has a problem with the fact that, for the most part, SOAP == Web Services? As for the horrible waste of time review, I again think that the person didn't really look at the book. This is the best book I have seen to date which describes how to mold your SOAP messages, write custom attributes, etc. These guys explain pretty well what SOAP is for. Better for Web Page scraping? I think that reviewer simply picked up a copy in a book store, read 2 pages, and that's it.

I really enjoyed this book but I think that the title was misleading. There was as much (or more) information about web services and .net as there was about soap.

Overall the book covered a broad set of topics and showed some good example code. If you're new to web services and soap, and you plan on using .net, this book will get you good coverage in a small amount of time. If you don't intend to use .net, there are still some interesting topics, but the sample code won't help much.

XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) is a language focused on facilitating the efficient, user-friendly and effective use and exchange of financial information.

Based on the widely-utilized XML (eXtensible Markup Language) language, XBRL is an important language that offers a host of benefits to both producers and consumers of financial data and information.

"Essentials of XBRL" offers a comprehensive overview of XBRL, in terms of defining and contextualizing the language and in terms of providing an executive-level overview of the benefits of XBRL.

This book is recommended reading for those interested in learning about XBRL. As XBRL is an evolving language, there are also a host of on-line resources and guides that should serve as good supplements to this book.

This handy and concise little book is full of valuable tips, techniques and real-world examples on the latest thinking, strategies, developments and technologies in XBRL. Highly recommended.

I'll save you the cost of this book by summarizing its content:

1. XBRL is a subset of XML that describes data using a pre-defined taxonomy of data identification tags established by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants ideal for reporting of financial data.

2. XBRL (with an appropriate translator at each end) can act as a common data transport, aggregator or syndicator between any number of disparate financial systems and databases.

3. Implementing XBRL might be tough because there are competing standards like EDI and ebXML for the transfer of financial reporting data with an installed base of hardware and software that companies might be reluctant to scrap.

4. If XBRL is implemented on a large-enough scale, accountants can stop doing their current jobs and become consultants.


Disappointing for a Wiley publication

My son needed this book for school and we received in time for school. Great service!

The books code uses depreciated HTML standards such as the font and center tags. The code is not well documented either. The JavaScript examples also lack good code structure. Some of the reference links in the book are dead. Aside from the many negative things about the book it has some good tips and the book layout is not to bad. The binding in the book is also decent. Each page is lamented so you will have extended life from it even if you spill stuff on it. Overall I would not recommend this book to a beginner because it will encourage them to use depreciated methods and coding.

Web pages are written in HTML, and Barksdale teaches this for an absolute novice. Hopefully, you should find it easy to follow. HTML's rapid success was due in no small part to this ease of use. It is also not a procedural language, though sometimes it is mistakenly called that. What Barksdale shows about HTML is that it is a declarative language. That is, you say that certain text should be written in a given colour or font style or size, and at a certain relative location on the page. You tell the browser what you want shown, and it has to implement that.

But Barksdale goes beyond HTML. As a display language, it is very limited. Whereas he shows how you can use JavaScript as a client side [ie. running on the browser] language, to perform actual programming tasks. JavaScript is a good functional complement to HTML, as you might appreciate.

This book dates back to 1999, and since I'm writing this in 2006, that's seven years ago. Seven years is a long time for computer documentation. Virtually everything in the book is so far out of date that it's useless. The authors also didn't do a very good job of staying on topic; there are many long digressions that are neither interesting nor useful. In many cases, the authors merely give a broad-strokes outline of how to accomplish a particular task, or talk about several different approaches that have been taken by different people, without concluding with anything very helpful about how to actually accomplish the task.

I have found this book almost as useful and interesting as the LaTeX Companion. I think that it gives enough information about sharing TeX and LaTeX texts on the web, but the chapters covering pdfTeX and SGML/XML applications could be more detailed.
I have found that there is another big problem - with every day coming the information tends to get older and older. I can fully recommend buying this book today, but I am not sure if I would do it once more after half a year has passed.

If you were interested in transforming TeX into PDF, I would recommend also the LaTeX Graphics Companion, or some other book introducing the problematic of PostScript and PDF.

I am an user of latex on linux for sometime now. The possibillities are uncountable with this excellent software. This book touches on the use of tex and latex for the web. Being not that experienced with all the possibillities this book is very usefull. It is a good introduction for converting latex and tex files to documents for the web. If you can grasp all the stuff in this book you will be able to easily prepare all kinds of documents for the web and in the end save a lot of time lost with programming html yourself.
Don't expect to much examples and user details, it has an excellent index and reference list to get you started.
There is a lot of math stuff in this book, so trying to get a lot of formula's on the web this will certainly be of help. I am not into math so a couple pages could be skipped.
Concluding: want to get started with latex and the web, want to make good documents for the web on a fast and good way, this is the book for you.

This book is a must-have for all designers. Expert to Novice can find information you need to make sure your project looks as good in print as it does on the screen.

This book is a solid presentation on print design principles and techniques with great examples -- it has been since Parker's first edition. The CD-ROM is falsely advertised as providing "examples, templates, tips and shareware." It has some marginal shareware and overdone advertising for Ventana, period. STRONGLY recommend keeping the older editions.

I found this book unused in one of our offices. Apparently purchased a couple of years ago. The content was good to great, many of the ideas are common knowledge to an experienced designer but it's good to have it put all together in one place.

Unfortunately the CD-ROM contained only its Windows files and all the Mac content was missing. I wonder if this is the case with all of the first printing ? This is not new to me. I have found other CD-ROMs that claim to have Mac files as well as PC files but somewhere during the production process the Mac stuff gets lost. From my studio, I produce for both platforms and find it hard to believe that more care isn't taken by some publishers.

So then, in conclusion... the book is a solid piece of work. Hopefully the cross platform clitch was fixed in the new edition.

This book is concise and gets you up to speed with RoboHELP quickly. As a technical writer that is just starting out, I needed a book that would teach me enough about RoboHELP so that I could add it to my resume with confidence. This book accomplishes this task quite well.

By the end of the first chapter, I already felt confident creating projects, topics, and links. This is the core of RoboHELP.

I advise you to read several chapters before installing the demo version of RoboHELP HTML as it is timed to last only 15 days. I had almost finished the book, but the demo time had run out. I just called Blue-Sky (makers of Robohelp) and they gladly sent me another 15 day trial disk. :) Don't be afraid to ask!

Great book and highly recommended. Skip the more complex ones, you don't need it.

Just a friendly warning that this is for the old 1998 version and not the version that started shipping in 2007.

RoboHELP for Dummies does an excellent job of teaching. Whether you are just learning RoboHelp or are an experienced user, this book will certainly come in handy. I am moving up in my company and needed to learn RoboHelp fast. This book taught me everything I needed to know real fast and was straight forward. There is no useless information in this book that will cause you to get bored or confused when reading it.

This is a very good book, I have learned a lot from it.

What I like about this book is that it focuses on the W3C DOM way of developing DHTML client applications. Most other Dynamic HTML books focus too much document.write(), proprietary extensions to web standards, or server side dynamic web pages.

Having researched quite a few books on Dynamic HTML, for those of you who want to get started, this is a pretty good book to get a feel for doing the W3C way.

I have to say while I enjoyed the writing style of this book, it is a total waste of time and money. There are many better resources available to learn dhtml for free on the web. The examples in the book, if they work, are repeated throughout the text without giving new examples. And they will not validate with W3C's validators.

The author's website is a joke, the book made it sound like you could get useful information and possibly even snippets of code from the site. Again I was disapponted.

I have in the past I enjoyed the Sam's 24 hour series of books, but perhaps they should have spent an addition 24 days, or weeks, or maybe even months getting this book right.

even though I had been making personal web pages for a few years, I found this book very helpful in pointing out the difference between the browsers and giving me pointers that had some how excaped my notice. I have recommended this book for beginners that have asked me HOW TO!

Not current. Not interesting

Another fantastic follow-up book by Lemay. Keeping the same style, end of chapter reviews, and reference notes. Lemay makes this another book to reccommend to everyone 'truly' wanting to learn HTML, and break free of those clunky editors. Wheather you're planning to learn HTML for fun, profit, or to enhance your skills for your workplace, this is money well spent. I purchased this back in June of 1995, and occasionaly glance at it to refresh my memory...i.e. it still holds it's own today.

This is a pictoral showcase of Flash and DHTML designed websites. For anyone looking for inspiration, and who would rather flip through a sturdy glossy reference than search the unfiltered web, this book will prove very useful.

Not much of a "how-to" book, but it makes no claims as such. I have one, and have seen everything in it - Danielson has done much work to save you some online surfing and allow you to concentrate on creation.

I was very disappointed in this book. Based on the description and other reviews, I was expecting a simple introduction to Flash and DHTML. Instead this book is just a list of about 40 websites and a screen print from each of them. This whole book could be summed up with a list of website bookmarks in an email attachment.

I am new to using Flash, having heard about the great moving graphics you can put together using little space. Looking at this book, and going to the listed sites, I am astounded at what I could do and what I need to learn. For you newbies, just starting to tinker around with flash, this book should be helpful by showing what you can do. NOT a technical book; I'd say you can use it with a tech book - this one for style, and a tech book to show execution.

This is a great reference book for beginners... I myself am a seasoned systems analyst and already had books that covered most of the basic topics discussed in this book. There were no real world examples and nothing about the pitfalls of using web standards before they are even supported by popular browsers. Like I said at first, it is a really great reference book; and if you need one to get started, this is it! You will still need a book dealing with the methodology variations in coding.

How the Web has grown! In doing so, and aiding its growth, has been the use and development of several languages. Naturally, Schafer starts with the language that birthed the Web - HTML. Actually this needs its dual ("twin") on a server, http. But Schafer discusses http in a later chapter devoted to CGI.

Hopefully, you should be able to appreciate that HTML is simple. In fact, of all that the book discusses, HTML is the simplest language. Several initial chapters walk you through HTML. It must be stressed that mastery of HTML is needed to make sense of the rest of the book.

The later languages either extend the scope of an HTML file, or they generate the file, roughly speaking. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) lets you easily factor out common definitions that are used across multiple web pages, where you can imagine that each web page corresponds to a file storing it. Schafer explains how to use CSS to simplify management of a set of HTML files. A centralised way to set common fonts and the like. More robust.

But HTML is a declarative language. Good, because laymen can more easily understand and write such languages. It's easier to say what should be done, than how to do it. But for the times when you need more expressive power on the browser, Schafer offers JavaScript. A procedural language that actually has nothing to do with Java. [The coincidence in names was a marketing ploy.]

Schafer does not ignore the server. CGI is given, as the first generation attempt at server side code. Its limitations spawned the use of Perl, PHP and Python for easier parsing of user input and generation of new dynamic pages.

Each of these languages (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Perl, PHP and Python) is often the subject of its own book. No surprise then that Schafer explaining all 6 gave us a book of this length!

This is a good book to refresh yourself on the syntax of each language, but don't try to learn web standards from this book! It spends about 10 pages in the HTML language section talking about how wonderful tables are when used to control the layout of your entire site. Anyone with any experience in HTML knows that this is a very bad idea. The Perl section had a few things wrong in the code as well. Overall, I was not impressed with this book. I probably could have gotten better tutorials for free on the internet.