XHTML Books

This dreadful book is so far below O'Reilly's normal high standard that it's hard to believe anyone at the company saw it before publication. It is riddled from start to finish with typos, technical errors, bad coding practices, contradictions and statements that are just plain wrong. It's quite baffling that O'Reilly would let a book this bad hit the shelves.

What is particularly worrying is that this is the second edition. The first was also full of mistakes (see the reviews on the O'Reilly website) and the publisher seems to have acknowledged this by rushing out this second edition only a year after the first, but the new edition fixes few of the problems of the first while introducing a host of new ones. One of the worst books ever published by O'Reilly. Avoid at all costs.

Maybe a genius or someone who already understands PHP basics will benefit from this book. I have made great progress with a number of instructional books, but got stuck in Chapter three of this one. It seems that important terms and concepts are not explained, not explained well, or explained in pages after the terms and concepts are first used.
I'm going to search for another book on PHP & MySQL.

While this is a typical O'Reilly book (marvelously and expertly written), there weren't many examples of utilizing what you just learned such that it would sink in. It also pre-supposed a bit (not much mind you) of programming experience/knowledge of which I have none. The description is a bit mis-leading that way as it states that if you know HTML and are ready for the next step this is the book. It should say, if you know HTML, a bit of C, or PERL, and some SQL you will benefit from learning PHP & MySQL. Not disappointed, just not the book for me...

It is not quite clear to me how any technical editor, let alone from a publisher specializing in technology books, could pass this text as is. It is quite obvious that the authors may know their way around developing simple database-driven web sites but completely miss basic programming topics (OOP, constructors, static variables etc. - all are explained in confusing and, at times, incorrect language).

Add to that grammatical errors, and perhaps a reminder that "kraut" is a derogatory term better left out of a mainstream publication, and it's quite baffling how this book made it to print in its current form.

I haven't seen other publications on the topic to compare against but this one certainly was a disappointment.

I have not bought a textbook in over five years. Back then, O'Reilly was a reputable brand. So when I needed to learn PHP and MySQL, I bought this book without doing any research. I will never blindly buy an O'Reilly book again.

I got to page 11 before finding my first typo. After that, I lost track of all the typos and coding mistakes I've seen. Mind you, this is the 2nd edition of this book. Clearly, the authors did not proofread their book, nor did anyone else at O'Reilly, nor did anyone who read the 1st edition (?). I have learned to not trust anything in this book and instead use google for my php/mysql questions. Also, the mistakes are not all obvious typos -- some are mistakes in reasoning, which I can catch because I have extensive experience with computers.

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

This is a typical course technology book with sections that go on forever leaving the students to wonder about what they just created and how could they ever do it on their own. Do your students a favor and skip this book.

One of the best books on the subject I've encountered in the last thirteen years of working with the internet. The tutorials are excellent - in that they appeared to be well debugged prior to publication. They do an excellent job in preparing a student for any of the four cases found at the end of each section. The only weakness encountered was that there was no comprehensive reference table of tags and associated attributes.

What originally attracted me to this text was that the code examples use valid XHTML. Unfortunately, the book is obviously a rewrite of an older book written with 1995-era design and structure approaches. Formatting attributes within the HTML tags have merely been replaced by inline styles, defeating the purpose of having a style sheet in the first place. Not until Tutorial 7 is there an external style sheet. There is even a chapter on how to design a site with tables; i.e., the old school way, and one can sense the author's comfort throughout that chapter. While it's good to be familiar with that approach, since one will run into such sites and have to work with them, to have such a large portion of the text devoted to it seems inappropriate in 2006 (this edition's printing). When HTML elements are employed in a modern fashion, there is some faltering, such as the label tag for an input element being followed by a break tag instead of setting its display property to block in the stylesheet, thus requiring as many break tags as there are labels. And as with many of the Course Technology books, the page numbers restart with each major section: the HTML section ends at HTML 578, then there are some additional cases (HTML ADD 1, HTML ADD 2, etc), then XML ends at XML 224, then there are appendices HTML A1 through HTML J16, then an XML appendix, then Ref 1 through 27 (reference section). At least the index indicates both the HTML and XML sections. One could complete this very thick book and be an expert at creating web sites the way we used to do it in the mid-nineties, the only enhancement being that the sites would be valid. I do think that many of the exercises could be reworked to be quite valuable, and I should mention that much of the instructional text is well done. The book is printed on very thin paper, as are many of the Course textbooks, but there is color throughout. I would not recommend this text to anyone considering adopting it as a class text.

1) The author blithely attempts to cover both XHTML and XML in this book, and does an absolutely horrible job; He tries to cover too much in one text which in my opinion, does a great disservice to the reader. **LOL it's like talking to someone who claims to be an expert in several topics, yet knows only vague generalities which anyone can pick up within five minutes of reading at their local bookstore**

2) Lots of time is spent discussing very (basic) HTML tags; might I suggest the visual quickstart guide (5th edition or higher) from Elizabeth Castro.

3) If one is serious about learning the ins and outs of XML and all of its technologies, (XSLFO, DTD's, XSLT, XHTML, XML Schema, etc) might I also suggest "XML Family of Specifications"...its a very dense text, chock full of information, challenging at times, but worth every penny.

I had to buy this book for a classs I was taking and I wish I could've returned it instead of using it. To give the book some credit, the explanations are easy to understand and the author gives good examples. However, the codes he gives are useless, because most of them are spelled wrong. For a coding that relies on accuracy, this book should have been edited better. My suggestion: Find a different book to teach yourself CSS and XHTML. Pretty much anything would be better than this book.

Here we go again, another book from Wrox press written by multiple authors from multiple disciplines. Professional Web 2.0 Programming is another deception for me in that it only provides high level details about web 2.0 and the book contains several chapters of subjects already mentioned over and over again in other books already. Let's start with Chapter 2. Here we have an overview of HTML, CSS, XHTML and DOM. I mean, why is this mentioned here? Is this a WEB 2.0 book or Web 1.0 book? Chapter 3 is about JavaScript and Ajax. What a waste, I already have a JavaScript book no need for half a chapter on JavaScript undefined objects. The other half is about high level design philosophies about Ajax. If this is what is referred to as a professional book on programming I'm really disappointed. Chapter 5 is a rehash of XSL with a mix of SVG. Chapter 6 is a waste of time about rich client applications providing little value to the reader. Chapter 7 is a rehash of the HTTP protocol URI. Chapter 8 is a rehash of XML. Chapter 9 talks about Syndication. Ha! Finally 15 pages worth of WEB 2.0 information via a high level definition of the RSS format. Chapter 11 is about web services, a rehash of other books on the subject.

Basically this book will hardly teach you anything you don't already know. They assume prior knowledge about almost every single topic they cover. They say in the preface that this book is not about java-script DOM, XML, AJAX or any specific technology for that matter. This book is more like some overview of all the technoligies that are used in Web 2.0 sites but none of them are explained in a way that someone without prior knowledge would understand. This book may only be useful for you if you are an experienced web developer with thorough knowledge in both backend and frontend technologies and just looking for some better practices and tips.
Unfortunately there aren't so many people that fit that description.

As per the other reviewer, this book uses one chapter for each topic: eg. HTML/CSS, Javascript, Design Principles, and sometimes not even a whole chapter eg, Chapter 5 includes SVG, XSLT, XPATH, XFORMS, and the discussion about HTML 5 and XHTML 2.0.

Each section only really makes sense if you are already familiar with the topic. If you are familiar with the topic, then the relevant section will only bore you. The areas where you are not so familiar will confuse you.

It seems this book is an attempt to explain Web 2.0 technologies in a really short sharp fashion, from the beginning. Unfortunately, each topic is worthy of its own book. Shrinking 10+ books down to one doesn't work very well.

However, I do think an advanced book that assumes knowledge of these technologies and explains how to integrate them together would be cool.

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.

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.