Markup Languages Books

I inadvertantly ordered this textbook using standard shipping. I thought it would come too late for the start of my class. Instead it came in the mail less than a week after I ordered it and in great condition. Thank you!!!

I don't know what all of the fuss is about. This book is written in plain english with pictures to illustrate. I understood everything in this book perfectly. There are no mistakes in this book:everything works as its supposed to. I'm not certain what problems others are having. The only thing I can think of is that links and pictures are providing complications. The book assumes you have knowledge of the way folders work on a computer. So if it says enter sanddunes.jpg as an image or image link, you're supposed to have the common sense to know that on your computer its saved under a completely different set of folders. On your computer it might be saved under C:/documentsandsettings/.../.../sanddunes.jpg; you have to enter the entire address on the notepad to make it work. This is the only problem I can conceive others are having because the book is easy to follow, extremely efficient, and above all, accurate. If you are fluent in english you should be able to understand this book.

Typos and such fundamentally infantile instructions. Every chapter explains how to open notepad because they believe we are monkeys who cannot remember such a basic task. Typos. Every exersize begins with "Start Notepad. Perform the following task using a computer: " A COMPUTER??? REALLY???? Thank GOD they spelled that out for me or I would have tried to use a shoehorn and toasteroven.

Diagrams tell you to look at 'line 32' and none of the lines are numbered. Note even in the illustration they're telling you to look at.

I am thoroughly disgusted that the college I attend made me buy this book and charged me $35 for it. I am disgusted they did not even do a preliminary review.

BAD!

If you are a beginner wanting to learn how to design Web pages, be wary. About half the pages have at least one typo in them. Seriously though, use caution when attempting to read this book, it may cause major confusion or other unwanted side effects. I'd recommend coupling it with HTML 4 by Elizabeth Castro.

This book is easy to read but unbelieveble it has many mistakes that confuse students and some of the examples are not clear to understand. I'm a student at Orange Coast College which is one of the best college in Orange County and I wonder how this book was chosen for this level. I don't recommend any body to buy or read this book to learn HTML because I'm a foreign student and even I could find the errores in this book.

If you are new to SOAP and you want to get the overall picture, and you don't care for details, this is the book you need.
If you need a reference guide, this is not the book you want.
If you're looking for a book about SOAP on a particular platform (say Java), this is not the book you need.

This book was a disappointment. I got thrown into an XML/SOAP project and had to get up to speed in short order. After struggling on my own for a while I bought this book hoping it would have lots of meat on actually using SOAP::Lite, but it had pretty thin coverage.

I did like the big-picture overview of the various technologies, but it was not very helpful in writing an actual SOAP client to talk to a third party's SOAP server. Considering that the author of SOAP::Lite also wrote this book, it seems to me that there could have been a whole chapter on SOAP::Lite from the client view.

This will stay on my shelf as a reference, but for getting up to speed rapidly on actually writing a SOAP client, it was a bust.

This book is a nice introduction to SOAP. It doesn't get caught in the Software wars and has examples of most existing systems. Another advantage: it is a thin book and not a 1000 pages bible. So you can easily read it in a weekend and then decide where you want to dig deeper (if necessary).

If your pretty new at SOAP, and if you need an overview, then this is the book you want.
If you don't care about interoperability, and you just want a book on SOAP within a particular environment (say Java), then this is not the book you want.
If you need a reference guide, then you don't need this book.

I was so keen to learn from this book, but no matter how hard I tried it had too much nonsense to be readable or usable.

To be fair, this book is over 3 years old. Of course it will have outdated information. At the time this was written the W3C wasn't sure which direction to go. That alone leaves lots of issues up in the air. I got this book 2 years ago and it was helpful then but I came back here looking for an updated version and did not see one. If you are new to DHTML this book will be less helpful than more recent ones.

I knew a fair bit about HTML when I bought this and I learnt a great deal more from it. A very useful introduction to DHTML, I use it as a reference book. I don't agree with the reviewers who criticise it so heavily, I think it is well worth having on your shelf. OK there are non browser-independant examples, but you will soon work out what is going to work with each browser anyway (or you should!) PS OK one or two examples failed for me, but most are fine.

This book is out of date and the author is pretty unsure if the code will work for IE 4. The author uses IE 4 beta to test the code. Also, I bought this book to learn about moving objects, this book does a poor job in explaining how to create animation with DHTML.

The book is not well organized, poorly written and cannot in any way be used as a reference. In many cases it does not tell you if the code will work with both browsers, in many cases it teches you old, non-standard technologies like JavaScript Style Sheets and Visual Basic Script. If you really like to figure out something yourself using book's narrow hints you might want to buy it. I actually managed to build a few sophisticated web sites partially because of reading this book.

The nicely laid out examples work only in Internet Explorer. The authors have no clue. This is book is a waste of time, as it doesn't address cross browser functionality of DHTML. If you're a professional stay away from this book. The irresponsible publisher should be held accountable.

I bought this book for a HTML class and it was very dissapointing. Even our teacher told us to disregard a couple of chapters because they were poorly presented and lacking information. I could not believe that I pay $69 for it. Still it contains some of the basic principles to get you started.

Wow I am pretty mad that this book was edited as many times as the author stated (8 pairs of eyes, I think they said) and it still had as many errors in it. I took the class online for the first time and our class average was a 38% because the text had so many errors and having to break the code on purpose to get it to work. I agree with the other poster about the same issues she had. I took the class again the following semester and I was one of 2 people who passed only because I learned from my mistakes of trial and error. My biggest complaint is besides the illistrated errors and typos in the text that confuse the reader, the asignments are pretty much just do step one then 2 etc and do not explain what's going on or why you are doing what it tells you to do. I know how to use HTML now a little better through practice, but I think surely this book could be a lot better with a new revision. I would not by this version of the book if you are a beginner.

Pro's lots of step by step examples, an interesting fictional website, some what helful Appindex with hex codes, tag listing for CSS, and HTML special characters.

This book has pictures on the pages in an effort to explian its ideas. The space would be better served if it were used to provide some actual content as to why you need to do something; because this book seriously lacks any. I'd like to say this may be considered a book for beginners, but it doesn't tell you what HTML stands for. Not that that is mind blowing but the entire premise of the book is simply, type this in, hit enter....
I dropped this book after the first chapter and bought a better book.

I had the pleasure of using this book for my college Web Design class and found it one of the easiest books to use. Using this book and the downloads offered by the publisher I aced all the projects at the end of the chapters. If you are new to computers then I suggest you go and take a Software Applications class first before you just in to Web Design. Also if you are not somewhat computer knowledgeable, then go back, learn all you can before you even forge ahead in to any type of Web Design.

This exciting and much anticipated third edition is updated to bring students the latest in HTML, conforming to XML and XHTML coding standards. Part of the Illustrated Series, this text offers a quick, visual, step-by-step approach for learning how to create, format, and enhance a Web page using HTML. The completely new real-world case scenarios and new content are sure to help your students grasp key HTML skills.

Provides updated HTML examples that conform to XML and XHTML coding standards, and new real-world case scenarios keeping your students up-to-date.

Offers content for a full-semester HTML course.

Includes two new units on Creating Links to Web Pages and Other Files and on Cascading Style Sheets.

Offers a quick, visual way to learn the very latest features of HTML, including how to design and create a Web page, formatting and adding graphics to a page, creating forms, tables and frames, and more.

Helps you prepare for your course with ease using the extensive Instructor Resources available with this text.

This new edition was just released in March and is up to date with the newest standards. The explanations are easy to follow and the illustrations lead the reader to the task presented.

This book introduces the beginner to HTML coding and no GUI editor is used or required. The reader gets to understand the content by seeing and doing.

Used in college level courses but it is successfully used in k-12 schools and for home users.

All reviews prior to March, 2006 are not for this book. My students and I love the book and I am sure you will too.

I'm an IT professional and I don't use XML in my work. I just wanted to find what XML is about. So I decided to buy a book. It happened that I chose this one. And I didn't like it.

First of all, the author writes a lot, but says few things. This becomes annoying. Then, another thing that I didn't like is that, after reading 150 pages, I couldn't tell anyone what XML was about. I had to go to www.w3c.org, spend some time reading some XML specifications and then come back the to the book. Only after I did this, the book made sense to me... But I bought the book in order to avoid reading the W3C specifications. I wanted something "lighter" than the standards...

Probably the book has some good things, but I don't want to mention them here because I am too affected by the weakness of this book.

My advice: if you want to read a book about XML, try another one!

I bought five XML books, and have discarded some. I thought twice before buying this one, and still bought a used book This is the first book that explains in plain English the fundamentals and foundations of XML, Document Type Declarations (DOCTYPE), Document Type Definitions (DTD), and other related technologies. So far, I've only read the first seven chapters, which gives me enough material to understand the underlying principles of XML. It's true, you have to do a lot of reading, but it's rewarding. This is not a tutorial book (for that you may need a more basic Step-By-Step book) This is for Intermediate-advanced level XML users. Five stars for Ms. Lee Anne Phillips.

I don't even know how they can pass this off as a reference book, since the index is so incredibly bad. There was ONE page listed for the ELEMENT definition, and that page had nothing to do with what it is or how to write one.

I can imagine, based on the MEANDERING style of writing, what this author is like when she talks - interrupting herself over and over again, until it is forgotten what the conversation was about.

I'll never buy a book from this publisher again, since obviously the editors never read it OR they DID read it , and weren't technical enough to know that it was garbage.

Glad I only paid three bucks.

The author seems to know her staff pretty darn good but I think she doesn't know her audience. I am not a "computer geek" by any stretch of the imagination but I do code a lot and I purchase and read a lot of computer programming books. This is the first one I have read and didn't understand. There are no examples its all just theory. I read up to the the 150th page and still couldn't write a 6 line XML document. She talks about "well formed" documents, DTD's etc and doesn't show you what they look like. It was until I read another book, that I actually new what XML was all about and I could write somewhat sophisticated xml documents.

I certainly think this book is good for some people but it just didn't do it for me. So next time Lee Ann, when you write your book put a "for computer geeks only" sign in front to let us know not to touch it. There are three audiences for computer books: 1. Beginners ...2. Intermediate ...3. Professional ...Just pick one and and stick to it.

This book uses far too much theory and virtually no examples for clarification. I had hoped for a book that would give me something to *do* with XML. There has to be somthing better. Don't waste your time with this one.

This book tries to cover so many things at once --XML, Java, DB concepts, tools, Servlets, -- that it ends up teaching technically nothing. About half the contents of the book are XML non-related stuff.

The author tries to cover such a programming language like Java in 470 pages of so many things, that he even does some bad practice! For example, he starts teaching a way of reading the contents of a file in Java, and two pages after the example he explain the Exceptions issue. If you're a Java newbie, you'll be on a big trouble unless you read the whole chapter before typing anything. The author even tries to explain the relational database concept by ilustrating it with an Excel sheet!

I must confess that this book covers just the basics, since it wastes too much time in things it can't cover. This book would be better if it talks about XML only, and leaves Java and other subjects to the pros.

If you want to "get serious" (like the author says), then buy a book that goes deep into this matter, a book that doesn't talk about everything just to mention a bit of each.

This book trying to cover everything among three-tier design within 470 pages, which is impossible. In order to understand this book, I need to read other books, like "Javaservlet" and "Beginning XML". But after I finish those reading, this book is not necessary anymore, so why wast time on this book? Some of the programs in this book are not executable and even worse.....some figures (screen shot) are misplaced.
My opinion of this book is "terrible"!

I haven't finished the book yet but found it confusing. The examples are not completed, the reader doesn't have an example of the completed exersize. The author assumes the reader is using apache and tomcat servers. I don't know anyone using them, most developers I know use windows 2000 or NT, running IIS. JDOM is still beta and there's a whole chapter dedecated to JDOM, where it could have been spent on explaining SAX and DOM in further detail by applying useful simple examples. Overall I'm not impressed with the book. Better to read it at the book store and look for something better to purchase. Look for a text that uses IIS and not tomcat and apache, unless you are running those servers. This is not a beginners book, also purchase a JAVA/JSP text.

In my opinion, The concept would have been good if the content was not so inept. The source code that was associated with this book was dismal, virtually useless. Many times the source code would not give the results in the book, so I found myself doing more trobleshooting than learning.

Both Que and the author should be ashamed of distributing such an inferior product.

This book is an excellent introduction of XML, as well as XSLT, XSLFO, in conjunction working with Java and SOAP. It clearly explains the fundamental concepts one needs to build a strong foundation. In learning a developer can see how XSL could replace JSP. This will definitely be an interesting battle to watch.

I bought this Javascript and HTML book about a year ago. I have used it many times to help me understand HTML problems I have had with code I am writing.

I think the book is pretty good. The Javascript section has some neat example code. This also helped me.

I'm just a beginner at this stuff.

I am basically a C++ programmer and have used other books by these authors. I got the JavaScript book because I needed to learn something about WEB languages.

The cover of the book claims a step by step approach to JavaScript and HTML. That is exactly what I found. For someone who knew nothing about the language, the authors had me writing programs with text, images, lists, image maps, forms, stylesheets and more in a very short time.

They also included a chapter on CGI.

I liked their chaptes on Events and Arrays. You know this stuff is very similar to C++ object oriented code.

If it weren't for the outrageous amount of typos in the examples presented in this book I might not give this book a bad review. It's relatively quick reading, not a bad book if your looking for something to familiarize yourself with HTML and Javascript enough to have a base of reference and to get started. However the code examples seem not to have been proofread. For example on page 139 the example for an anchor that this is repeated in each example on the page, 6 times!

On the next don't care if these guys don't know how to spell present, but I feel that 6 incorrect closing tags on one page should have been noticed! This book is consistently sloppy. I'm a little shocked this was allowed to go the press the way it is. The graphic design is a bit hard on the eyes, too.

Here's a copy of the email I wrote to Prentice Hall: Dear Sirs, I have
purchased this book (Javascript & HTML 4.0 User's Reference)
because I am a web developer and I wish to learn Javascript. I have to
say that I am disappointed with the book for the following
reasons:

***The book is entirely too heavy on HTML 4.0. The preface
states that the book is designed for people who are actively writing
web pages and want to incorporate a programming language into their
web pages. However, the presentation of the first 8 chapters leads me
to believe that the book was really written for a beginning html
developer. The title of the book is Javascript and HTML 4.0, but the
entire 1st half of the book is dedicated to HTML and the new HTML 4.0
features (many of which didn't work when I tried them). I think this
effort would have been better served had the javascript section been a
majority and the html section included as an appendix. ***There are
TONS of errors! Half of the time I spent reading chapter 8, I was
thinking there were two different types of cascading style sheets
called CCS and CSS. And the errors aren't just in chapter 8, they're
all through the book. In chapter 3, page 78, figure 3.6 shows the
output of the example coded previously (Example of FONT FACES), but
the code is incomplete and only shows the title tag! Spelling errors,
coding errors, and ommissions everywhere! Doesn't anyone there have a
SPELLCHECKER! Or a "find/replace"? I am halfway through the
book and it's barely even mentioned Javascript. I am very disappointed
and I wish there was a way I could get my money back! This book is a
waste of time. This book should be renamed: HTML 4.0 (and a little
javascript)...!

If this book was software it wouldn't even be Alpha. Mispellings galore... Examples without explainations... You name it... It is done poorly.. The first book I purchased without doing my homework and boy did I pay for it... Do yourself a favor review before you buy...

The book describes the JAXB api based on an early access version. The definitive version is completely different form the early access version, making this book almost useless.

The book describes the JAXB api based on an early access version. The definitive version is completely different form the early access version, making this book almost useless.

This book was written before the version 1.0 release of the JAXB data binding API's. As a result much of the information in this book is incorrect and not current. If you follow the instruction in this book you will NOT sucessfully perform XML binding to java objects. For example, the book uses DTD's as the XML description model used by JAXB. This is wrong DTD's were dropped in favor of XML schemas. The instructions for using the JAXB jar files are wrong. The required jars have changed since this book was printed. The instructions for using the generated java data binding classes is wrong, the usage has changed since this book was written. The author tried to get to far ahead of the technology curve on JAXB and as a result authored this book too early in the JAXB life cycle. The book is of minimal value.

This book was written before the version 1.0 release of the JAXB data binding API's. As a result much of the information in this book is incorrect and not current. If you follow the instruction in this book you will NOT sucessfully perform XML binding to java objects. For example, the book uses DTD's as the XML description model used by JAXB. This is wrong DTD's were dropped in favor of XML schemas. The instructions for using the JAXB jar files are wrong. The required jars have changed since this book was printed. The instructions for using the generated java data binding classes is wrong, the usage has changed since this book was written. The author tried to get to far ahead of the technology curve on JAXB and as a result authored this book too early in the JAXB life cycle. The book is of minimal value.

This does not talk about JAXB at all. What it talks is about some non standardised APIs that existed before JAXB.
The brief mention of JAXB ( 4 pages ) is only philosphical. Even that is w.r.t. an obselete version with DTD support.
( Current JAXB only supports XML schema )

I have used this book as a learning tool in training classes and have found it gives a sound foundation on DHTML and how it is implemented in Netscape and IE's current supported versions. Ms Williamson has layed out the basic principals that are being used today and lays the foundation that can be built upon by Developers and Designers in the future. Although some of the examples did not work as they were intended we were able to make sense of what the intention was and see how the usage would enable us to provide pages for clients that could be impactive and easily viewed.

I thought this was going to be a good book for creating business class Cross-Browser DHTML Web Applications. IT'S NOT.

Apparently, the target audience for this book was the weekend web-hobbiests who want cute interactive graphics for thier homepages.

This book is not worth the paper it is written on.

If you are looking for the source to solving all your issues that just don't seem to work for both IE and Netscape, this is NOT the book. Nuff said.

The reviews below are entirely accurate about the (lack of useful) content in this book. But I have to add that I've never seen a book as poorly edited as this one. (There are a lot of poorly edited books out there, too.) Variables change their name from one line of code to the next; typos abound; and on p. 184 a query by the editor to the author has been duly set into the code! So the code is unreadable, and even after you correct for the typos and errors and omissions it still doesn't work, and even if it did work it would be lame.

I paid ... for this, too.

In the year 2001, what would you expect from a NEW book about "cross-browser Dynamic HTML" ? I would expect a book showing me how to develop code that will work in Internet Explorer 4.x and up, Netscape Communicator 4.x, Gecko-based browsers like Netscape 6 and Mozilla, plus preferable a general implementation of (or at least a discussion about) "future-safe" DHTML based solely on the recommended W3C and ECMA standards. It is "alternative" browsers like Opera and Konqueror I hope to see support of through the pure standards based implementation (and it will proplably work with the Gecko-based browsers and the upcomming IE6 browser too).

Does Heather Williamsen book live up to my expections ? I'm afraid very far from... Heathers ambigition have been to support IE4-5, NS4.x and NS6. I guess this is allright as a MINIMUM, since it covers the browsers most people will use for some time. But at the time of writing the final version of Netscape 6 has clearly not been released yet, and wheather Heather hasn't done her homework good enough or if the specifikations of Netscape 6/Mozilla has changed during its development, I don't know, but it is a fact that none (or very little) of the DHTML-code pressented in the book will work in Netscape 6, Mozilla or other browsers based on the Gecko layout engine. The worst mistake is that Heather takes support of Netscape 4.x Layers for granted in Netscape 6. Layers is not part of the W3C standard, and this propritary Netscape 4.x feature is NOT supported in Netscape 6 or other Gecko-based browsers !

Off course you can learn something about generating DHTML that works in IE4-5.x and NS4.x in this book, but without (working) support of Netscape 6 I can never recommend this book to anyone taking webdevelopment seriously. I hope there will be some comprehensive corrections/updates to find on the Apress website soon, becourse if not this book has been a completely waste of money for me. Sorry about these hard words.

The day there is a good cross-browser DHTML book that lives up to my expectations mentioned first in this little review, please let me know ! (Why hasn't anybody written a review of "New Perspectives on Creating Web Pages with Dynamic HTML" [ISBN 0619019182] telling about its browser/standard support yet ? - No I'm not gonna buy it if I don't see somebody else reviewing it in a positive way. I aint gonna burn my fingers twice).

The book is written in a very boring English. The authors tries to describe everything in text, whereas a simple example would have gone a long way.
The examples are scarce inside the text. Well, at least "good examples" are... Whenever he reaches the simple concepts such as parsed entities, he gives a couple of examples, but for more complicated such as unparsed, the examples are vague and trivial.
The same goes for explaining the attributes. CDATA is explained thoroughly (as in all other resources available on the web), but ID, IDREF, NMTOKEN,... just mentioned in one line, without a single example. I had to spend a lot of time surfing the web to find some clear explanations.
You could argue that he was trying to present a brief introduction. Well, that's not exactly true. He tries to touch everything in the least clear way possible.
There are tons of better books on XML out there. Don't waste your time and money.

The author uses lots of phrases which are explained very quickly, and to vague to be of much use. This is a book for beginners, and you wont come very far reading this book, but you might, perhaps, learn the basics.

I have tried to read this book over the course of two weeks, I can't get more than a couple pages without nearly passing out. This thing reads like stereo instructions. I can not comment on how accurate the information is, as the author is so boring, I can't retain any of it. No specific examples, all very vauge references.

The real title should be "Learn all about what XML is, with a few examples, in a bit over 3 hours, ten minutes at a time." But that wouldn't sell the book by its cover. Very clear, following the "tell you, tell you, told you" style. A bit dry but mostly very easy learning since it's in ten-minute chunks. Takes the mystery out of XML. Opens your eyes to all that it can do. Finally makes clear what a "DOM" is (document object model.

I've been a software engineer for 20+ years. This is the worst technical book that I can recall. Way too many forward references - "Now I'll use a technical term that I won't explain for another two chapters".

Most technical books have some forward references but this is ridiculous. To make it worse, some of the terms are never clearly explained even when you get to that section of the book.