Markup Languages Books

This is a total disaster. The authors don't know how to present material for readers to understand. Examples are half cooked and mixed up between soap 1.1 and soap 1.2.

The book is very confusing. Not clear and concise. Several of the chapters seems to be rehash of documentation meant to increase the size of the book.

HTML in the present www era is like driving a Model-T down a superhighway surrounded my semis.

The authors should either keep up with the pace of development of the Interenet...or stop writing about it.

This book would be a waste of money imho.

When I ordered this it was described as a paperback. It is nothing but a flyer. It ended up costing with shipping almost nine dollars and if I return it I have to pay another four dollars. It isn't worth my time but this was very misleading and I just threw it out. It is sad as this was for a boy who is trying to change his life. He is trying to find direction but thank you for not meeting my needs.

I found this book to be very poor. It lacked organization and continuity. More important, it lacked practical, simple examples.

The author is clearly well versed in the subject area, but the book does not convey the concepts behind the code. The examples are obscure and cryptic.

For the record, I have 4 years experience in web development. Before approaching this book, I had researched and implemented HTML, DHTML, Active Server Pages, Java, JavaScript and VRML. I mention this only to make the point that I don't think the book is simply too advanced for me. I think it's just a lousy place to start to learn CDF technology.

I just ordered IDG's "Web Channel Development For Dummies" (ISBN: 0-7645-0309-X -- got it here at Amazon.com) I hope it will be more useful.

When approaching a new language/technology, I tend to go to the "...For Dummies" series first. The IDG books are great for "getting my hands around" the new subject. If I feel that I need more depth, I'll look for a Microsoft Press book on the subject. (Most of the products I use are from MS.) If I determine that I need the full scoop on the subject, I'll pick up the hefty Que book.

One last note -- I've been thumbing through the other "Web Dev" series by McGraw Hill. They all seem rather similarly scatter-brained.

Just Enough Web Programming with XHTML, PHP, and MySQL
This Book is the least concise book I have ever read. There are 2-3 important things per page buried in fluff. I am completely new to this subject and want to start quickly so this book sounded great, but the book is more the author talking about "this is too technical so we will ignore it" then anything else he says it several times per chapter and spends a paragraph telling about where else in the book you can find more snippets about it.

The book is hastily put together and overall seems a confusing mess, which is the state your mind will be in after reading it.
For example the Chapter on DTD's has incomplete tables and waffle strewn all over the place.

This is surprising because usually Schaum's books are okay.

Good XML books are hard to find. I think this is because they seem to be written for a target audience of HTML Web designers who the authors believe will find technical language hard to understand.

The author, in attempting to dumb-down ends up producing muddled waffle, which leaves the reader frustrated and disillusioned.

Although my background is in Java programming, I do believe that all readers no matter what their background would benefit more from tight, concise well-set out technical prose.

As such I recommend the XML Pocket consultant by William R Stanek. The book is clearly set out and to the point. It's clarity reminds me of programming classics such as "The C programming Language" by Kernaghen and Ritchie and "A Programmers Guide to Java Certification" by Mughal and Rasmussen

I gave this book 1 star only because I'm not sure if you can leave the option blank. Remember - although a book may be inexpensive, the wasted time spent trying to work your way through it is infinitely more costly.

Almost totally useless for a commercial shop. Instead of describing a document production environment the book 'points and clicks' through the GUI user interfaces of a mishmash of unrelated tools. Some samples on the CD may be helpful.

I've been using SMIL for about a year now and was hoping that this book would give me a good single reference to use in leiu of the W3C documentation which can be a bit dry. I was actually encouraged when I found out this book was being delayed, since I figured that meant that SMIL 2.0 related material was being included. My problems with this book are two-fold:
First,SMIL 1.0 and SMIL 2.0 is intermixed throughout the book and since most players still do not implement SMIL 2.0, most of the examples will not work, leaving a newcomer to SMIL confused. SMIL 2.0 tags are not even specifically identified until you read Appendix E, which is only on the CD. Once you buy the book and print the PDF file in Appendix E, then and only then can you go back through the rest of the book to see what you can do now versus what you'll be able to do shortly. I realize that SMIL 2.0 is 'just around the corner' but if I'm building today, I need to know what I can do today.
My second problem is with the CD. Other than the directory for applications and the Appendices, this is disk was not much help. Most of the examples will not even run on Real Player 8. Many of the chapter examples contain only the SMIL file and none of the media references. Several of the examples reference directory structures not on the CD. What you end up with is a few megabytes worth of documentation which can be printed or

stored on your hard disk and a CD which can act as your drink coaster.

This is absolutely 100% the worst book on a computing subject I have ever had the misfortune to purchase, and that really is saying something when the subject matter is as straight forward as XHTML.

My thoughts throughout reading this book were the words 'incomplete', `incorrect', `inaccurate' and `in the bin'. The `Complete' in the books title is totally misleading, for those of you who already have some marginal XHTML experience you will notice the shortcomings over and over again, for those of you who don't; well you will never know just how bad your knowledge of this subject will be until you check out another XHTML publication. Also this book only covers XHTML 1.0, which isn't the latest standard (or should I say attempts to cover).

Note that this book is just one big advert for all their other publications as the entire book is compiled by chapters taken directly out of their other publications. They clearly state on the opening pages that one reason for compiling this book was to acquaint the customer with some of their authors, writing styles, and teaching skills so that you can easily find a match for your interests and needs as you delve deeper into XHTML. A point to note about this is the contradiction with the books title and that statement. I mean the books title is XHTML `COMPLETE' and yet they tell you that one of the reasons for this book was to help you find a match to delve deeper into XHTML. If this book was complete you wouldn't need another book to delve deeper into this subject. All you're really doing if you buy this book is paying for an advertisement, and a very bad one at that.

Another point about these chapters is that many of them come from books published 5 or 6 years ago, the information in those chapters simply doesn't apply to the web today, and the books themselves are actually out of print, amazingly this is stated in the inside covers of this book. This also highlights how little time and effort went into producing this book, you can actually tell that they went through the chapters looking for every instance of HTML and simply added an X to the front. They didn't even bother to correct the errors in the original chapters before putting them into this book.

This book consists of:

A: incorrect information
B: totally out of date information
C: poor design techniques (like encouraging the use tables for layout in an XHTML document)
D: lack of important information and explanations (leaves you hanging time and time again)
E: mass repetition from chapter to chapter (this comes from having so many different authors covering the same subject)
F: contradictions galore (this also comes from having so many different authors covering the same subject)
G: some information copied and pasted right out of the W3.org website

It doesn't even cover all the rules of XHTML and the ones they do tell you about they break often. It's funny how a book over 1000 pages can give you a feeling that it is so full of nothing.

I admit I knew I took a chance when I bought this book as having read other reviews on the complete series it was clear they weren't generally very good, I just assumed that with such a simple and straight forward subject as XHTML you couldn't go wrong, the only thing wrong was that assumption as this book is a very bad joke.

This book is an exceptionally poor advert for their other publications, unless of course this book does accurately reflect their other publications. In either case I don't intend to find out EVER.

Amazingly I do have one good thing to say about this book and that is the CSS reference section. It is pretty complete and gives you examples and explanations of each CSS property. It even covers CSS2 and CSS3. However this doesn't make this ... book worth buying. Some may say you get what you pay for but in this case you don't.

This book is filled with XML, HTML, XSL...but not much XPath! It's virtually impossible to use as a reference (almost non-existent index) and essential topics are all too often skipped over.

Probably a reasonable book for an introduction to XPath but just not sufficiently definitive for professional use.

Too much narrative NOT ENOUGH XPath!

The publisher is Wiley. I've not bought a Wiley book since I was at university. I must remember to avoid this publisher in the future.