weak, somewhat deprecated
xul appears to have changed a lot since this book was printed.
many of the xul tags discussed and used, the xul templates used,
have changed. thus, most of the xul examples in the book are
not going to work in firefox.
e.g. the xul css skin url is no longer the same. lots of tags
such as "titledbox" have been renamed.
i'd say this content is deprecated.
also, in my opinion, these chapters add no value
to the book and in general weakens the
existing content:
an xml primer
css
the jxul project
May-be wait for 2nd edition?
I bought this because of the JXUL project. To that end I found this book very handy to understand that basics, intermediate aspects and application of XUL, RDF, XBL, etc.A lot of time is spent talking about Mozilla (obviously). The problem is that a lot of that content will be quickly out of date. Discussion of other projects like Luxor (like JXUL), Xavier (server side) and the enhancements made in Mozilla since being published would make a welcome second edition. May-be wait for Mozilla 1.0.
Quickly out of date - wait for 2nd edition?
I bought this because because of the JXUL project. To the end I found this book very handy to understand that basics of XUL programming and quickly got me up to speed.A lot of time is spent talking about Mozilla (obviously). The problem is that a lot of that content will be quickly out of date. Discussion of other projects like Luxor, Xavier and the enhancements made in Mozilla since being published would make a welcome second edition. May-be wait for Mozilla 1.0.
Great book!
In my line of work with SGML, the transition into XML comes pretty natural and with that the notion of "Hey, there is really a lot of cool stuff one can achieve with this!". Especially when you add XUL, XBL, RDF, and JavaScript/DOM to this.
Thats where this book comes in really handy. The chapters are laid out pretty well and don't require a lot of experience with XML, although some basic knowledge of how a markup language work helps. The only downside about the whole XUL at the moment (in my view) is that its currently only supported in Netscape 6.x. The XUL support in Mozilla got broken somewhere between milestone release 0.92 and 0.94. However, the jXUL project looks really promising and would certainly make up for the lack of browser support since this will run as stand-alone applications in a "Runner" application.As others have mentioned, the chapter on RDF was pretty scary and daunting and should be revisited by the reader a couple of times. There are of course lots of RDF resources on the web that could provide more help and insight.
The chapter on Netscape Themes (including the appendix containing all the different images and buttons used) could probably be left out in the next edition, to give more room for RDF or DOM?
Grand total; A very good book on this topic that certainly will inspire the reader for further research in this area.
Great book! Very little BS
Bought this book about a month ago, so I think I've had a pretty good chance to review it. It's very good, despite the fact that Mozilla hasn't got up off their keesters yet! I'm an XML developer with limited Java experience, but the JXUL project they put in there as their open source project is very, very cool! That I think was worth the price of the book.I personally thought the RDF chapter was a monster (scary to me!) but very well covered! I'm sure when I progress as a programmer I'll be doing a lot of the RDF.
I think the book is very well written, especially considering I am still a beginner/intermediate web developer.
(12 reviews)
