Book Review - DHTML Utopia by Stuart Langridge
Category Book Reviews
I ran across an interesting title on web programming the other day... DHTML Utopia: Modern Web Design Using JavaScript & DOM by Stuart Langridge (Sitepoint). If you already understand JavaScript, CSS, and HTML, along with the concept of the document object model (DOM), this book might give you some pretty good ideas...
Chapter List: Introduction; DHTML Technologies; The Document Object Model; Handling DOM Events; Detecting Browser Features; Animation; Forms and Validation; Advanced Concepts and Menus; Remote Scripting; Communicating With The Server; Dom Alternatives - XPath; Index
The main intent of this book is to show the reader how DHTML can be used to add a degree of dynamic interaction not often seen in average web pages and applications. Because the book is not overly large (slightly over 300 pages), there is an assumption that you're already familiar with JavaScript, CSS, and HTML. These technologies make up a large part of what's known as DHTML. The other piece is the document object model. Using JavaScript to manipulate the page structure when events occur, you can make the page do things like add fields, expand and collapse parts of the form, highlight rows and columns of tables, etc. Langridge does what I would consider a review of basic DOM concepts before launching into many, many examples of DHTML you can steal for your pages.
This is one of those books where you "learn by doing". Under no circumstances would I consider this a book I'd use as a reference manual. If you have problems with a script or you don't understand certain language functions, you're basically on your own. The ideas and techniques are relatively easy to follow, and you can easily add the code by typing (or downloading from the website). So if you're comfortable with learning by diving right in, you'll probably have better luck with this book than those who might be trying to gain a comprehensive understanding of every part of DHTML. You'll also like the book if you just want some ideas to explore...
I ran across an interesting title on web programming the other day... DHTML Utopia: Modern Web Design Using JavaScript & DOM by Stuart Langridge (Sitepoint). If you already understand JavaScript, CSS, and HTML, along with the concept of the document object model (DOM), this book might give you some pretty good ideas...
Chapter List: Introduction; DHTML Technologies; The Document Object Model; Handling DOM Events; Detecting Browser Features; Animation; Forms and Validation; Advanced Concepts and Menus; Remote Scripting; Communicating With The Server; Dom Alternatives - XPath; Index
The main intent of this book is to show the reader how DHTML can be used to add a degree of dynamic interaction not often seen in average web pages and applications. Because the book is not overly large (slightly over 300 pages), there is an assumption that you're already familiar with JavaScript, CSS, and HTML. These technologies make up a large part of what's known as DHTML. The other piece is the document object model. Using JavaScript to manipulate the page structure when events occur, you can make the page do things like add fields, expand and collapse parts of the form, highlight rows and columns of tables, etc. Langridge does what I would consider a review of basic DOM concepts before launching into many, many examples of DHTML you can steal for your pages.
This is one of those books where you "learn by doing". Under no circumstances would I consider this a book I'd use as a reference manual. If you have problems with a script or you don't understand certain language functions, you're basically on your own. The ideas and techniques are relatively easy to follow, and you can easily add the code by typing (or downloading from the website). So if you're comfortable with learning by diving right in, you'll probably have better luck with this book than those who might be trying to gain a comprehensive understanding of every part of DHTML. You'll also like the book if you just want some ideas to explore...
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