SGML Books

Reviewer: Budianto

This book is not ideal learning XML. it help you to learn how to develop web applicatin , and keeps many key skills in their own chapters,even if they would be needed together.

I have read books about HTML, JavaScript, C++ and honestly THIS BOOK IS THE WORST that I have ever read! I wanted to learn some XML from this book, it starts talking about its capabilities, use, implementation, functionality, examples, examples, blah, blah, blah... zzzzz.
If you want to learn how to use XML take my advice, do not consider this book. However, if you know XML this book has examples of how can XML be implemented, though I think it is not worth its price.

Definitely this book is for those who dont wanna know XML, it contains nothing.

You'll spend most of your time waiting for something to happen. There is essentially no connection between the CD-ROM and the text.

Others have already said it better than I, so I'll keep this short:

* not enough information to be useful

* poor presentation of the details

* it only babbles on and on about how great XML is, without telling you anything about any pitfalls or, for example, the shortcomings of DTDs.

Charles Goldfarb should actually look at these books, before lending his name to them.

If you want the real deal, go with the Wrox Press book: Professional XML. Sure, it's big, weighs a ton, and you'll probably never need to look at more than a third of it, but I swear even just the first 4 chapters are worth the price of the entire book!

I was greatly disappointed with the contents of this book and above all after learning that the editor is the one who invented SGML(Mother of XML)...they should think a hundred times before writing this kinda books. Please stop circulating this book in the market. Why are you people giving wrong information to people???

This is absolutely the worst book I have ever attempted to read. I agree with the other reviewers' remarks concerning the author's cutesy feeble attempts at humor. More irritating, however, is his failure to describe adequately the topics on which he touches, and the organization of the book is poor. He tells you part of something in one chapter, and maybe another part of it in another chapter - or not at all. When you apply the instructions he provides, the result often doesn't work, and there is nothing in the book to help you figure out why.

Most of the section headings are extremely stupid puns. Now, I have nothing against puns, mind you, but there is an enormous difference between a smart pun and a stupid one. Damon Dean must not be able to get the smart ones. Yet from a navigational standpoint, using puns in headings is really stupid. The headings are what a reader relies on to locate a topic. Any competent writer knows that. When puns are used in the headings, the reader is at a real loss about the subsumed topic, which completely defeats the purpose of the headings in the first place.

The old adage "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with B. S." no doubt applies here. Generally when a speaker or writer succeeds only in confusing the audience, it's because he doesn't know what he's talking about. I would venture to say that that is the case with Damon Dean.

If this were the only book a person had for learning how to use cascading style sheets, he would give up on the subject altogether before he got halfway through. I, for one, will never waste my money on a "For Dummies" book again!

The writing in this book is muddy, and like another reviewer here, I had to buy a second book to figure out what this book was saying. Since Dummies books are for beginners, a logical order running from easy to difficult should be used. This author is all over the place.

The above is bad enough, then add to this the obvious fact that the book was merely spell-checked but never looked at by an editor (or at least by one who knows grammar and syntax).

The code isn't consistent, and the index has errors.

Don't buy this book. It was obviously pushed out the publisher's door without any attempt to make sure customers get their money's worth. Don't you get ripped off too.

Full of errors and mistakes -- not only this, but the author is impossible to follow. Had to buy another book on the topic. Stay away.

While it's true that the Dummies series are supposed to provide a way for the less-proficient to easily get their feet wet, this installment is so annoyingly scripted as to be headache-inducing. The author attempts to lighten the load by injecting humor into the book. But the jokes are bad and they mostly just clutter the author's run-on sentences. The text is so cutesy at times I found myself actually getting fatigued reading it. This book could be simplified and probably cut down by 50 pages if the author would dispense with the "funny" interjections and just focus on the topic.

Of course, it's just a beginner's guide, so the book serves no practical reference purpose after you get through it.

The author mingles in many personal remarks which clutters the content substantially, making for a difficult, annoying read. After finding another introductory & intermediate CSS book, & then comparing the two, I can honestly say CSS For Dummies is not organized well, has examples which do not contain vital information or a variety of applications. Based on other books I've owned & read, this book is a poor choice when learning CSS.

Worst of all, there was at least one sample file on the included CD where illegal [chemical] use was cited in the text (see Ch8_fixed.html on the CD - the author writes about "being pissed", and taking [a chemical]). Examples as this clearly make the book an undesirable selection - especially for youth trying to learn CSS. There are simply no reasons for either using offensive language or blatant references to illegal [chemical] use in a book like this.

I'll never buy another "Dummies" book again.

I only just got the book, but the people who complained that it doesn't stand up to the usually high O'Reilly standards are spot on. The second chapter, which is all about "getting started" ought to explain basic concepts clearly. Instead it throws out all kinds of mumbo jumbo and forward references like "You could also define this style rule in an external stylesheet and make that stylesheet part of the package for your application, as we do later in this chapter ...." Why? Why should I keep reading to find out? Why does the first chapter of real content (chapter one understandably explains more background on mozilla and XPFE) seem to have a forward reference every third paragraph?

Clearly, the authors did not sit down and make a coherent plan of what the best way to introduce each topic to the neophyte. This stands in stark contrast to the various O'Reilly Perl books that always seem to give the overview in clear terms and then flesh it out, instead of diving into the middle and trying to explain it as you go.

The only reason right now to get this book is because it appears to be the only (or one of the only) ones on the topic at this time. Hopefully _Rapid Application Development with Mozilla_ due out in November this year will get it right.

I was always interested in creating my own apps for Mozilla. I had played around with some of the custom CSS files and peeked at the XUL files, and I wanted to learn more. I figured that buying this book would be a no-brainer because of the O'Reilly name and my good experiences with the ... Hacks series. This could of been a good book, but it seems like they were rushed to meet a publishing deadline. It starts out building a skeleton application (xFly) to explain the simpler concepts. One would expect that they would continue to flesh out the framework, and they would show how to add function to the various widgets. After Chapter 2, they abandon this idea. The examples they do provide don't work correctly. If you get the finished xFly demo program from mozdev.org, it does not work either. The site reads "This requires serious attention". I agree. This book is a good reference manual, but a poor tutorial. If you want a good tutorial on how to build Mozilla apps, try xulplanet.org instead. Co-incidentally, this entire book is available at the aforementioned site if you would like to preview this book for yourself before plunking down $40 to buy it.

I happened to be experimenting with XUL and Mozilla at the time that I ran across this book, so I was very eager to get into it and see if it could help clarify some of the gaping holes in the existing XUL documentation within Mozilla. As an exhaustive reference to XUL and the associated technologies that are used to build Mozilla applications, it was very successful. As a higher level tutorial that explains the relationships between the different technologies and their uses, it was not quite as successful.

Chapters 1-6 lead the reader through the progressive steps required to build and package a Mozilla-based application. The authors create a demo application called xFly which is used as a test bed to show the different features of XUL, CSS, and JavaScript. By the end of Chapter 6, this application contains a tree control, a bunch of sample menus, and various other assorted UI widgets. But it doesn't really _do_ anything. Maybe I'm too picky, but I'd rather see an application that has some function, even if all it does is play tick-tack-toe. Then, to me at lease, it's much clearer how the different pieces would fit together in a "real-world" application.

Chapters 7-12 cover more exotic and difficult aspects of Mozilla
programming such as the Extensible Binding Language (XBL), XPCOM (Mozilla's component object model), and accessing web services from XUL applications. These chapters are very dense in technical details, with good references to online resources for further study. Overall, I found this book to be a very succinct source of accurate information about building applications with Mozilla. Its only weakness seems to be that it focuses too much on low-level implementation details without giving the reader (who may be new to the idea of XML-based GUI
application programming entirely) a good high-level overview of the benefits of this type of development and which technologies serve which purpose. Chapter 1 is the only chapter that explicitly addresses high-level application architecture, and it is only 8 pages long.

The bottom line is that this is a good reference book for people who already know how and why to build applications based on Mozilla, but a not-so-good introduction and tutorial for people who are completely new to the XUL-CSS-JavaScript paradigm of application development.

This was the first Mozilla XUL book that I read; I now have Nigel McFarlane's book as well. I find it useful to have more than one reference book as I can often find things in one that are not in the other.

I found this book quick and easy to read and a good introduction whilst also going into sufficent detail.

Importantly for me it contains information on how to go about creating a remote application to run over the Internet and using serverside PHP, neither of which have I seen mentioned elsewhere.

The book is not perfect but it is useful and I think some of the other reviewers have been unduly harsh; I am glad that I was not put off.

This book gives a solid grounding in the principles involved and acts as a primer to the nitty gritty of producing a XUL application. In practice, XUL is pretty easy but it's easy to be caught unawares which is where a book like this comes in. If you've ever wondered how to extend Mozilla with a new button, or why your chrome doesn't work, or why Mozilla ignores it, or how to write a new chrome application then this is the book for you. Learn the principles of XUL and things fall into place very easily.

I am puzzled that other reviewers claim XUL and Mozilla are not ready for mainstream since the fact that an entire browser, mail, chat, editor, JS debugger and hundreds more third party extensions and apps have been written using it demonstrates it is. It certainly needs tools and add robustness, but it is already a viable and strong technology for producing platform neutral applications.

It is well worth the money, however it should be revised to reflect the latest Mozilla developments. As an added bonus, the source for this book is actually online so you can evaluate it yourself at books.mozdev.org before buying it.

Okay, first what I liked in this book:
1. not many pages, which means it is psychologically acceptable. ;-)
2. excellent introduction to "web-security" (yeah, that's it).
3. simple, and clear explanation
4. nice introduction to the http protocol!

Now what could be improved?
1. change the title - well, it deals a very little with AJAX, so those who want highly technical stuff on AJAX will be disappointed.
2. nothing. :)

In my opinion, this was the *best* book on web security that I've read. It introduces you firmly to the subject, without pushing you too deep into any particular topic. Advanced readers obviously can build on what is presented here.

-Amarendra

Since Ajax is such a hot subject right now, I thought the book Securing Ajax Applications by Christopher Wells would be a worthwhile read. Unfortunately, that's a very specific title for a book that tries to cover far more ground than just Ajax security. When you get done, you'll have a better idea about web-based software and hardware security from an architecture level. But you'll probably still be wanting a book that specifically covers "Ajax" security.

Contents:
The Evolving Web; Web Security; Securing Web Technologies; Protecting the Server; A Weak Foundation; Securing Web Services; Building Secure APIs; Mashups; Index

The book starts out with the history of HTTP web communication, alternatives that developed over time (like Flash and applets) that would allow e-commerce, and then how Ajax stepped into the fray. All pretty general stuff, and probably already known if you're picking up this book as a means to refine what you already do with Ajax. The chapter on Securing Web Technologies talks about the types of attacks that can be carried out over the web. Again, you've likely covered all this before if you've been programming web apps for any length of time. From there, you learn about browser weaknesses using Microsoft's STRIDE model (Spoofing, Tampering, Repudiation, Information disclosure, Denial of service, and Elevation of privileges). As before, it's good information about security, but still not what I would consider Ajax-specific. Protecting The Server gets into how to harden a HTTP server, but the same observation applies... not specific to Ajax. The last few chapters get into more of what I would consider Ajax topics, like web services, mashups, API's, etc. But even then, we're still in a position where the information can be characterized as applicable to far more than just Ajax usage.

I think most of the problem comes down to the title of the book. After all, that's what attracts you to pull it off the shelf and take a look. If the title was more generic, like Securing Web Applications or Web Environment Security, I'd feel that I was getting the content that the author "promised" in the title. But using Ajax in the title appeared to be an attempt to use a hot buzz word for a book that was more general than that.

This "book" would more appropriately have been published by a "vanity press" publisher, rather than a reputable publisher like O'Reilly. There is very little, if anything, that can be said about the book that castes it in a favorable light. The publisher, O'Reilly, loses credibility for allowing themselves to be duped into adding this book to their catalog. The author is very smart and technically proficient, but maybe a little too smart and too cynical as regards the intelligence of the reader. He hasn't fooled anyone however. The book is nothing but an exploitation of a catchy title, with practically nothing inside of relevance to that title. This book will find it's rightful home in your garbage pail. Better yet, don't buy it.

In its 211 pages, Christopher Wells written a good book with one bad feature: Barely speak about the title-theme. In my opinion, this book is a good guide to start your studies about web security. Its chapters covers issues like web-server security, secure ways to develop your applications, many demonstrations of threat exploits and how to protect your application to them.
My conclusion is: If you want start your studies in Web Security, go on and buy this book. If you already did this and want to learn specifically about AJAX Security, try other book, because this one won't help you so much.

I was really looking forward to this book as this topic is very important to my job. But there is very little AJAX-specific content. The closest it comes is chapter five that dabbles with JSON a bit.

If you want to secure AJAX applications, you can pass over this title and stick to the basics:

- Learn and apply holistic, defense-in-depth development principles. A great primer for this is Writing Secure Code, Second Edition.

- Dig deeper into web-specific practices--both development and networking/administration. Although a little outdated (references Windows 2000 a lot), the best book I have seen so far is Improving Web Application Security: Threats and Countermeasures.

- Just remember that AJAX is nothing more than using JavaScript at the client to pull back XML from the server, so your weakest points in your application can be hardened with plain 'ole input validation. Validate at the client to ensure you have a properly assembled HTTP request going out. Validate at the server to ensure incoming variables don't break any rules, and XML encode all user input (preferably using Microsoft's free Anti-XSS library) on the way back to the client to avoid cross-site scripting.

This book. Is what it is. The ideas presented are not new.
It's full of code which should have been left out of the book.
His writing style is hard to read. He goes off on tangents that make no sense.
A very bad book.

The book is kind of blur and not much indication on how to do it. It is not worth to get one actually.

XML is a critical emerging technology which has the potential to revolutionize database connectivity in enterprise software development. While the author provides knowledge about XML document design and delivery, the book falls short of providing meaningful insights to those who wish to construct integrated commercial XML/Database systems.

The writer doesn't seem to have a good idea of the history and development of these database concepts for commercial use. For example, he doesn't seem to know that Object databases have had repeated failures in terms of performance, maintainability and a host of other factors in mission critical applications.

He would have gained by referencing "Foundation for Future Database Systems: The Third Manifesto," by C.J. Date and High Darwin, and by familiarzing himself with "The Great Debate," where E.F. Cobb demonstrated how non-relational models are orders of magnitude more complex than relational models for the same problem.

As someone who has architected and developed large scale XML-based database applications, I sense that the author has come from a perspective of writing specialty XML document delivery databases for non-commercial purposes in the biotechnology industry, and provides minimal material which would be useful to anyone seeking to implement industrial strength XML databases (in an application server, for example) or to use XML messaging with relational databases (e..g., with webMethods and Rendezvous' Tibco.)

The author has a writing style which is quite chatty and unprofessional, which continually distracts from its purpose, which is to compare XML, Relational and Object database design issues. Buy this book to skim through it as a reference, but do not expect it to be of great value to many of the issues that are likely to be faced in building enterprise class databases. You can find better information of a higher quality on this subject for free by visiting [certain websites] and reading many of their XML-related articles. It may be of more value if you only wish to create XML document servers.

The author discusses some interesting topics, but I found the book far too full of vague statements about the usefulness of various ways of encoding XML and of database architecture. Similarly, the chapter on querying XML databases was enough to whet my appetite, but it was mostly on the representation of queries (useful, to be sure, but confusingly presented), had little about efficiency considerations (surely of paramount importance when discussing queries), and presented as "algorithms" methods that are so unrefined and simplistic that they're better labeled "query methodologies."

To be fair, I haven't been all that impressed with the other XML books I've been skimming...

This is a great book, very useful for programmers, database developers, students, system architects, and anyone else who wishes to effectively use, design, or build XML databases. A basic knowledge of XML and databases is assumed, and the focus of this book is on pulling them together. Some advanced techniques are described in this book and the presentation is fairly dense in those areas.

The book covers variety of topics like:
How to design a schema for an existing XML DBMS beginning with the concepts of the field being modeled and resulting in compatible schemas for XML documents, relational databases, and object-oriented applications.
How to store XML data in a relational DBMS, object-oriented DBMS, or flat files, and how to make decisions on which approach to choose.
How to design a system architecture that contains an XML database, Web server, and user applications.
How to develop a user interface for XML data accessed via a Web browser or Java application.
How to query an XML database and what algorithms support XML database querying.
How to create a native store for an XML DBMS.

You're wandering through the desert for hours on end when someone appears wanting to to sell you a cold bottle of beer. You're thirsty and would pay just about anything. You pay the price and then discover it isn't cold and it isn't beer and it doesn't quench your thirst. You've been had. Buy Beginning Adobe AIR and you may feel like this.

I bought a copy here on Amazon. There are just not many books on AIR just yet, so I thought I'd give it a try. This one was obviously rushed to press. The publisher and editor should be embarrassed by their lack of oversight. This greatly diminishes WROX standards of quality. There are many places where the author copied and pasted whole sections, changing a key word here but forgetting to make a change there. Really stupid and unprofessional. What is presented in so many chapters and through repetition could be concisely written in just a few chapters.

But is the information ultimately useful? Well, maybe to a few readers. In my opinion a few hours spent working through some of the sample applications on the AIR website might serve you far better than this title. Also, keep a watch for other titles that will surely appear on this exciting technology. I just can't recommend this volume ... unless you are really, really thirsty.

While I appreciate the AIR v1.0 has only just been released, this book was far too light on - I didn't really gain anything that I had already learnt from Adobe's quickstart and sample apps. It's a pity because there is a heap more stuff in AIR that just a little extra insight could have really added a lot of value to this book.

I've never been too fond of the Wrox books but am happy to note that this was an excellent starter book for AIR. I decided to roll the dice on it (based on poor experiences with other Wrox titles) because of the author (a noted Flex/AIR guru), whose blog I've read. Well, Rich Tretola (the author, that is!) did not disappoint. The book is concise and packed with good informaiton on AIR and the new APIs you'll want to use/learn. Speaking of the APIs, all code/examples in the book are useful and focused.

If you are looking to get started with AIR, this is an excellent book for you.

If you're looking for a big 'Hello World' book using Flex then this is the book for you. The publisher has done a great job in mentioning all of the relevant technologies without saying the book is targetted towards Flex developers.

It's solid. It has a "cookbook" feel to it, which I like. What I mean by that is that the book dishes out info in a succinct way and covers pretty much what you'd like to know when building an app. Things like, prepping the xml description file, accessing the local file system, connecting to remote data, interacting with the OS. Good stuff.

I don't like how short it is, about 300 pages. The text is big, has lots of pictures (this is good but it inflates the page count), and a few tables that I thought were unnecessary.

If you are competent in Actionscript, but don't know much about AIR, this is great. I'm an advanced ActionScripter, so this book really just fills in a few holes I had about AIR, and will serve as a good reference when I need to be reminded how to say, move a directory on the users computer or how to set the window chrome of an application.

This is probably one of the worst teaching CD's I have ever seen. Indeed, the author, who is also the instructor for the college course, clearly has no concept of what good programming skills or good presentation styles are . The entire course was basically copy & paste exercises with no real instruction whatsoever. There was no challenge. I could have learned just as much on my own. To add insult to injury: he gets the money for the poorly written (and required) CD. I would give it 0 stars if I could.

Do not buy this "book" (it is actually a "Web-site" on CD) unless you are forced to buy it as required material for a class... and in that case - borrow it from some other poor soul who has already purchased it - since they certainly will be happy to get rid of it.

It is hard to imagine anyone finding this a helpful item. The author apparently has no idea how to present information in a cohesive and usable manner, and seems to have only a beginner or hobbyist level grasp of the principles he is attempting to teach.

He seems to be preaching about "Intelligent Tutoring Systems" and how to make a great web site using Javascript, but the overall navigation, presentation, and content of the "site" is so amateurish that it is embarrassing. Most of his code examples are of poor quality and show a misunderstanding of programming principles, or are at least so poorly thought through that it is a disservice to the student or Javascript beginner to offer this material as being instructional. In my opinion, the student will come away from this material with a misunderstanding of web site development, Javascript programming, and professional practices - if she/he is able to actually follow the materials and can get past all the broken links and dead-end pages that is.

One example of the poor quality of the material is that when you select the button to view the "correct" answers for two of the three Javascript tutorial quizzes - you are shown the answers to the first quiz. Not very helpful! And this is typical of much of the material.

If the author had followed his own advice in the following quote from the "book" then perhaps at least the material would be readable and navigable, if still virtually useless:

"Creating an effective and attractive Web site involves much more than throwing images and text onto a background graphic. Flashy images and super-cool technology won't keep viewers on your site. It's necessary to learn how to construct a creatively-designed, carefully developed, consistently maintained Web site."

Don't bother buying this product - you are guaranteed to be disappointed.

This CD-ROM book took me step-by step through all the intricate moves necessary for programming and installing a well-designed web site. The clear instructions are beautifully organized and illustrated throughout. I highly recommend it to anyone who has basic computer skills. The designers of some of the sites I've visited could improve their skills if they took lessons from this first-class instruction manual.

I read this book for a class, and was disappointed. The writing could have been a lot clearer, and there were numerous typos which is very problematic when you are trying to read/learn code)

Nice cut and paste job of basic information freely available out on the web. Don't waste your money..

Good for Basics, Textbook like approach.Easy to follow

Just what I wanted. Good comprehensive cover of the basic princples. Thanks

This book is too complicated for someone that just wants to get started with Frontpage.

I was dissapointed with this book because it really doesn't document or explain many of the new features in Frontpage 2003 --particularly the database and Windows 2003 Server Sharepoint Services capabilities. The chapter on forms does not explain how to integrate the form with a database, giving the excuse to see a later chapter. The later chapter on databases then states that most database features are out of scope of the book. How about starting with some basic coverage of how to setup Frontpage 2003 to work with sharepoint team services? If you don't do it right, you simply get an error message from Frontpage stating that these features don't work because one has to have a server. I got the distinct impression that the authors have never really used Frontpage 2003, wrote most of the content based on earlier versions of Frontpage, and relied too much on Microsoft's skimpy Frontpage 2003 documentation for the new features.