Web Books

The authors have done a great job of providing criteria, explanations and examples for web users who wish to evaluate information found on the web. We all know there is a ton of stuff out there, much of it bad or biased. Now we know how to tell the wheat from the chaff. Individual web users will want to have this book handy when looking for consumer, health, business or other kinds of data on the web. Teachers may want to require it as a text or supplemental reading in courses which involve web use. Students who include information found on the web in their research can use this guide to determine the quality, currency and objectivity of web sites. This book fills a gap in the literature. Nicely written. Easy to read. Great gift idea.

The authors have done a great job of providing criteria, explanations and examples for web users who wish to evaluate information on the web. We all know there is a ton of stuff out there, much of it bad or biased. Now we know how to tell the wheat from the chaff. Individual web users will want to have the book handy when looking for consumer, health, business, or other kinds of data on the web. Teachers may want to require it as a text or supplemental reading in courses which involve web user. Students who include information found on the web in their research can use this guide to determine the quality, currency and objectivity of web sites. This book fills a gap in the literature. Nicely written. Easy to read. Great gift idea.

This book is an in-depth analysis of the factors that make a Website believable. The authors, two librarians, examine numerous aspects of Websites and point out how they can be used to evaluate sites as trustworthy sources of information or goods. They begin with 5 traditional evaluation criteria: authority, accuracy, objectivity, currency, and intended audience, and give examples of how these criteria apply to Websites. They also extend these criteria with evaluation measures that are specific to the medium. They then apply the evaluation criteria to different types of Websites: advocacy, business, informational, news, personal, and entertainment pages. This book is a must-have for libraries and researchers. It would also be very useful for serious Web designers who want to understand what kinds of design factors will bring credibility and respect to their Websites.

It is more for Unix/Perl systems, but the ideas behind are great..

I've been bashing my head against a wall with learning Perl, and this book is the first that I've had any luck getting anything to work.

Paul's a great author and walks you through the steps fairly well.

The cool thing is, is that all the programs he offers in the book work together and will make you a pretty comprehensive site for a lot less headache than static pages and search and replace!

As intermediate-level user, I found this book to be the bridge which could carry me to expert. This easy to read "toolbox" is a great investment in any web-designers future.

The WEDDLE's Guide is an absolute "must have" for employers and those seeking new jobs. The Directory has excellent reviews of over 300 leading job sites, and especially the niche sites. A recent survey indicated that the niche sites is where over 82% of the candidates come from for employers, so knowing which niche sites are the good one's is important. The WEDDLE's Directory is THE source for any employer or candidate wanting to know where to go!

This is a key piece of recruiting strategy for corporate and agency recruiters alike. I typically don't like paper-based resources anymore and used to go to google to find sites.

I have now learned that this book can make the difference between using the web successfully to fill your positions or spending a lot of time and money on web resources with poor results. Reach for this book first for help in making good decisions and your client satisfaction rate will soar.

No more guessing about the kinds of resumes and visitors on a site. I have found sites that are perfect for my search that I would never have found otherwise.

Free updates are available on the website weddles.com in addition to several other useful resources. I highly recommend this essential resource and encourage you to visit the web site as well.

As a career recruiter ( 5 Corporate and 13 Search Firm) I consider this the top resource that you can have at your fingertips. It gives you the information that you need to make an informed choice on where to search post an opening.

Recently,when I ordered the new edition, I called the office with a question and found myself speaking to Mr Weddle himself. He is involved in all aspects of this book.

Don't miss out on his on-line newsletter which keeps the book up to date at all times.

No matter if you are a rookie or a seasoned professional- you need this resource to bring you to the next level of succes in the industry.

I already bought this book before it was released. I love wicket and this book sure makes it easier to work with Wicket. It gives you a great in depth view on how wicket works. Adding more and more complexity in all the different chapters.

A needed read for anyone who wants to get the most out of Wicket.

I don't normally review books on Amazon but this is one of the best technical books that I've read in a while. The authors do a great job of organizing and presenting the material. The book is easy to read and I was able to get through it in about two evenings. I'm now using it as a reference while I work on my first major Wicket application. It might help that Wicket itself is well structured which makes the concepts that much easier to understand.

That being said, there are a few short-comings:
1) The cheese and lasagna examples get really old really quickly. The authors could have used different concepts or something a little more relevant or interesting to most developers.

2) The book is somewhat short. While they covered the core topics well, I felt that a few things we missing. I was surprised to see that the publisher trimmed the book and put an extra chapter online but not in print.

3) Some fundamentals like what DTD to include in an HTML page or what the Wicket web.xml should look like would be nice. You can find these answers online with a quick search but this book should really cover it.

But these faults don't hurt the overall usefulness of the book. It would be nice if most/all of this documentation was available in the Wicket project itself, but no such luck which makes this book even more valuable. I don't know if it will be in all copies, but my copy had a coupon for a free version of the digital book (PDF I suppose)... nice touch.

I recommend buying this book and learning about a very reasonable alternative to JSF.

This is a great book that really gives a in-depth overview of Wicket. I've been working with Wicket for a couple of years and had to suffer through figuring things out from examples and mailing lists. This book is the definitive guide. I've already learned several new things from it. Many thanks to the authors who went to great lengths to get this book out!

I got this book expecting that it would just sit on my shelf most of the time. I'm a DBA, not a developer, and was really just getting this so I would have it to thumb through every now and then. When I opened it, I started looking through some of the chapters, and couldn't put it down. I read 5 chapters that first night, and went back again and again. The author clearly knows this technology, and has a very relaxed, smooth style. He also has a very educated sense of humor that reminds me a bit of Dennis Miller. You will not be bored reading this book. I was also impressed with the level of depth he was able to reach in a book that was supposed to only survey the material. I found myself sitting at my server with the book in my lap trying the things in each chapter. I have a basic knowledge of a lot of the technologies in this book, but I had no idea how much I didn't know. This isn't the only book you'll need to finish a project, but even if you've been developing for years, you'll learn quite a bit that you never thought possible. The reference sections in the back are incredible too. Very complete.

I really enjoyed the section on DHTML, and XML. I have been writing with DHTML for quite some time, and it's one of those things I just memorized, but this book actually explains so many things, I find myself going back over my own code and actually understanding why I had to do things the way I did. Don't even get me started on the JavaScript section. Is there anything this guy doesn't know? My only real complaint is that the publishers didn't contract him for a sequel. This is a book that could easily be split into 2-3 different volumes, and I firmly believe that the author could more than fill them up. Trust me, he is a true master of his craft, and even if you're old-hat at most of this, you will still learn enough to make the cost of this book worth your while. Tom Yager really went out of his way on this one, and he really understands what people need/want in a book on web development. I sincerely hope he writes another.

This book is targeted at a technical person, who doesn't have extensive exposure to Microsoft Technologies. As a software architect coming from a Unix/C++ & NT/Java background, this book gave me enough background to feel confident in building architectural prototypes using Microsoft Technologies.

The flow of the book is very good, transitioning from major section to section with little difficulty. This book is not a reference book on any of the technologies mentioned on the cover! It is a great overview of each topic and how they inter-relate.

The downside of this book is that it doesn't go into enough detail in some areas. To actually begin implementing some of the ideas, you need another teaching aid to learn the Microsoft Tool in question. Fortunately, the book offers pointers to good references on each of the tools described.

All in all this book was a very thorough, easy read giving a great overview of the current state of the art in Microsoft System Architecture.

I got this book expecting that it would just sit on my shelf most of the time. I'm a DBA, not a developer, and was really just getting this so I would have it to thumb through every now and then. When I opened it, I started looking through some of the chapters, and couldn't put it down. I read 5 chapters that first night, and went back again and again. The author clearly knows this technology, and has a very relaxed, smooth style. He also has a very educated sense of humor that reminds me a bit of Dennis Miller. You will not be bored reading this book. I was also impressed with the level of depth he was able to reach in a book that was supposed to only survey the material. I found myself sitting at my server with the book in my lap trying the things in each chapter. I have a basic knowledge of a lot of the technologies in this book, but I had no idea how much I didn't know. This isn't the only book you'll need to finish a project, but even if you've been developing for years, you'll learn quite a bit that you never thought possible. The reference sections in the back are incredible too. Very complete.

I really enjoyed the section on DHTML, and XML. I have been writing with DHTML for quite some time, and it's one of those things I just memorized, but this book actually explains so many things, I find myself going back over my own code and actually understanding why I had to do things the way I did. Don't even get me started on the JavaScript section. Is there anything this guy doesn't know? My only real complaint is that the publishers didn't contract him for a sequel. This is a book that could easily be split into 2-3 different volumes, and I firmly believe that the author could more than fill them up. Trust me, he is a true master of his craft, and even if you're old-hat at most of this, you will still learn enough to make the cost of this book worth your while. Tom Yager really went out of his way on this one, and he really understands what people need/want in a book on web development. I sincerely hope he writes another.

This book is a must for anyone interested in Topic Maps. It would certainly pay to have some familiarity with XML, URIs, etc, because otherwise the examples will be hard going. If you do know XML, then you'll be away, because XTM is a very small and simple vocabulary.

Each chapter is by a different author, and each one comes at the subject from a different angle. Topics covered include tutorials for using the XTM specification, topic maps for website Information Architecture, Knowledge Representation, Ontological Engineering, e-learning, visualisation, relationship to RDF, information about various software implementations (a bit dated now, but still valuable), as well as sample topic maps and XSLT code.

Because of the diverse - even contradictory - viewpoints, the book as a whole provides an excellent overview of the field.

Since Tim Berners-Lee wrote of the Semantic Web
several years ago, there has been speculation about
how we might embed meaning within Web pages, as
opposed to merely displaying content. To answer this,
XML offers the separation of content from display.
From its user definable tags, different user
communities can define their own sets of tags and
associate meaning with those. XML offers the
infrastructure. But it is still fairly low level.
Assembler language, as it were, compared to more
powerful languages like C or Java.

So if XML is like an assembler, what is the analog of
C? This book puts forward XTM, XML Topic Maps, as the
answer. It consists of 17 chapters by different
authors, outlining various aspects of XTM. The
chapters can be divided into two types.

One type has nitty gritty explanations, replete with
examples of XTM written in XML. If you are a
programmer, these chapters are for you. There are web
sites listed with XTM definitions that you can

incorporate into your XTM, just like using standard
namespaces available on the web in normal XML.

The other chapters deal with the much deeper and
harder problem of how XTM may be used for Knowledge
Organisation and Knowledge Representation. They are
high level and abstruse, edging up to the issues of
semiotics and artificial intelligence.

As a side note: In the XTM examples and
implementations given, I was surprised to see no
mention of altavista's graphical representation of

search results, circa 1998. This was not in XTM, but
it conveyed the flavour. What happened was that if you
searched for, say, 'tornado', the results would appear
as a graph. The nodes would be the main keywords in
the documents containing 'tornado'. Nodes would be
connected to each other if documents contained both
those words. In this case, one might see two non
intersecting clusters - one related to weather
patterns, and the other to jet planes. By clicking on
a node, you could expand it into finer grained graphs.
It complements this book, whose main thrust is in
manually describing XML documents in an XTM format,
because it could achieve much the same visual results,
but derived automatically from arbitrary web pages.

In order to fully appreciate this book you will need a good working knowledge of XML and associated W3G documents, and more than a casual exposure to knowledge management. The first four chapters are a blend of historical information about XTM (XML topic maps) and fundamental technical information that describes design rationale and components of XTM (which is a separate open source initiative that is based on the ISO/IEC 13250 Topic Maps standard).

Chapters 5, 6 and 7 dive into the mechanics of XTM and knowledge management, and requires the prerequisite knowledge I cited above. This part of the book is not an easy read. This is not a reflection of the authors/editors ability to write as much as it is of the nature of the material. Knowledge management and development issues are given both wide and deep treatment in these chapters. Chapters 8 and 9 go deeper into the XML family as they relate to XTM (with an emphasis on XSLT), and address creating and maintaining sites that use XTM/XSLT as the core of a knowledge management strategy.

Related topics are covered in Chapters 10 through 13, including open source tools, RDF (widely used as a mechanism for weblogs and blogs that are gaining popularity), and semantic networks (intelligent agent-based systems). The final two chapters tie together the preceding material with a chapter devoted to topic map fundamentals for knowledge representation and a chapter about topic maps in knowledge organizations.

If you are interested in using an XML-like technology as the foundation of a knowledge management strategy, or are interested in learning about new directions in the integration of web technologies and knowledge management this book is ideal. For the technical reader the code examples, pointers to open source and commercial solutions and the website that supports this book (using topic maps, of course), this book is an excellent way to leverage knowledge of XML and use it to develop knowledge management solutions.

Yahoo! To The Max: An Extreme Searcher Guide is a outline of all of the resources and services offered by Yahoo! These varied services range from search engine and directory services through news and discussion groups to shopping and games. Many of these services are available to the general public however to make full use of all the Yahoo! resources and services, the author of this book encourages readers to join Yahoo! as a free member.

Yahoo! To The Max: An Extreme Searcher Guide is mainly for those who haven't really explored Yahoo! or those that don't realize that Yahoo! is much more than a search engine. Nonetheless, even the Internet surfing expert will find a few services or reference resources that he or she never even knew existed. As the author says, the best way to learn about the services offered at Yahoo! and on the Internet in general is to click on the various links and fully explore the areas that interest you the most.

Well I hadn't used Yahoo for the last several years because I could do whatever I wanted on Google. So, I didn't really know what I was missing until I read through this book and tried the myriad of little tricks detailed throughout. Yahoo has grown up and is a serious competitor to other search engines as well as a preferred site for some purposes. Author Randolph Hock introduces the reader to the details of various services of Yahoo including Groups, News, Mail, Messenger, GeoCities, Chat, Message Boards, Shopping, Auctions, Classifieds, and Finance. If that isn't enough he includes information on how to use Yahoo's city guides, maps, weather, people search, and lots of other useful stuff. Have you ever been to a website that did not have a search function? I've been to a lot of them. The author details how to deal with these situations using Yahoo and including site:www.sitename.com on the search line. When you do this it just searches that site! Or if you want to find all the sites that link to another site you can use the link syntax in the search box. I did that and it returned eight links. Surprisingly I did the same thing on Google and it only returned four and only one of them was the same in both engines. A couple of more searches following the instructions in the book and I was surprised to find that in several instances Yahoo returned more relevant results than my old favorite Google. With lots of details on how to use Yahoo effectively, Yahoo to the Max is a highly recommended book which has convinced me that I can often get the results I am looking for more easily from Yahoo than from competitors.

In 1994 Yahoo was started by two Stanford University graduate students, David Filo and Jerry Yang. It was at the time when the Internet was just beginning to take off and there were an increasing number of web sites available to Internet buffs.

These two enterprising students developed a collection of selected sites arranged in categories or a web directory that they made available to others. It soon became a very popular search engine, and in 1996 the company went public.

In 2004 the focus had changed from a directory function to a portal and search function.
Yahoo had also established its own "crawled" database, instead of relying on others.
Furthermore, in August of the same year, Yahoo came out with a home page that no longer even prominently displayed the directory.

I have to admit, that after reading Randolph Hock's Yahoo To The Max An Extreme Searcher Guide, I was quite surprised to learn all of the newest Yahoo features, and yes, it made me think twice about that other search engine whose name begins with G.
The resulting book is an excellent manual exposing all of the nifty features of Yahoo presented in an informative and accessible style.

According to the author, Yahoo is the best general portal on the Web, as it has the capability of integrating a broad variety of services and consolidates them nicely on a single page. Even Google has now recognized the usefulness of this approach, and as pointed out, they have been expanding into a wide range of other offerings (directory, news, images, shopping, local, etc) even to the extent of appearing to imitate Yahoo in several ways.


Hock exhibits a sharp eye for the small but important details of Yahoo that will help you better appreciate its value as a portal and its content rich quality.
This is quite in evidence as you read through the book's nine chapters, wherein the author has done an admirable job in explaining Yahoo's home page, effective search and browsing techniques, personalization of the site, groups, news, mail, buying and selling through Yahoo, financial page, and other miscellaneous tidbits as maps, travel, weather, health, photos, music, desktop search, etc.

I was surprised to learn that not only can Yahoo aid you with searches on the Web, but can also provide you with an easy, fast, and effective search of the contents of your computer.
Another feature that I have experimented with is the personalization of the portal pertaining to its appearance, contents, services, messages, and you can even add such features as calendar options, events and task listings, and many more.
It should also be pointed out is that most of the chapters include figures that aid you in fitting the pieces together in order to comprehend its usefulness.

As mentioned in the Preface, the book is not intended to be the definitive, "everything anyone might ever want to know about Yahoo!" book. Its purpose is to act as a guide to the serious "extreme" user in getting the most from Yahoo.
One last mention, as Yahoo is constantly changing, and to keep you aware of these changes since the publication of the book, a Web page has been set up.


Norm Goldman, Editor Bookpleasures.com

I'm on the internet everyday. By using the "You Are Here College Internet Guide" I am able to quickly review the subject matter of dozens of internet sites, FAST. This helps me avoid wasting time going through the numerous garbage sites listed by search engines. This book is a 'must have' for college students and for anyone who frequently uses the internet.

Until I purchased this book I spent most of my time on the Internet looking for the sites I wanted to see. With the "You Are Here College Guide" I spend more time using actual websites and less time lost in the search engines. Now everything I do on the Internet, from researching to online banking, is much easier. The Internet is a tool and here is a book explaining how to use it!

YAH College Internet Guide is fantastic! Parents, buy it for your kid
in college - they'll love it. Students, get one -- you'll find a site
you really needed to know about.

A great book for those interested in learning a new language. Anyone with a basic knowledge of programming will be able to understand it. Although it is suppose to be learned in 10 minutes, it actually takes 10 days, but the point here is that u would master it at the end of the book.

Tim Evans has provided for all WWW users the best and simplest way to learn how to create first rate WWW pages using HTML. This is an outstanding "how to" type of book very suitable for everyone from novice standard and up. Tim takes you in a series of 10 minute lessons over a couple of weeks (or just a couple of days if your a fast learner) from knowing nothing about HTML authoring to producing quality WEB pages of the highest standard. And then adds to this with valuable advice for those new to Internet and a list of brilliant sites from which to retrieve more HTML tools

Short, sweet and to the point - this has the meat I need without any of the fluff. It helped me quickly get up to speed in no time. Easy to follow lessons with great tips.

If you need to quickly learn Dreamweaver, this is the book to get!

The books introduction says excatly how I feel about Dreamweaver, its complexity, its feature rich environment, and its power to captivate you, the user, when you click "Save As..." for the first time and realize how simple creating a web page could be.

What the introduction does not say is exactly how I feel about the book now that it is done and available for you to purchase. Although I am disappointed that I was not able to write more about a program that truly amazes me every time I use it, it does offer a beginner's level introduction to a variety of the features that are at your fingertips. I know that afyer reading this short book, the wheels will begin to spin and you will be just as captivated and amazed by Dreamweaver as I have become over the years.

Zak