Great beginners reference book for beginners!!
This is a great reference book for beginners... I myself am a seasoned systems analyst and already had books that covered most of the basic topics discussed in this book. There were no real world examples and nothing about the pitfalls of using web standards before they are even supported by popular browsers. Like I said at first, it is a really great reference book; and if you need one to get started, this is it! You will still need a book dealing with the methodology variations in coding.
Web standards?
This is a good book to refresh yourself on the syntax of each language, but don't try to learn web standards from this book! It spends about 10 pages in the HTML language section talking about how wonderful tables are when used to control the layout of your entire site. Anyone with any experience in HTML knows that this is a very bad idea. The Perl section had a few things wrong in the code as well. Overall, I was not impressed with this book. I probably could have gotten better tutorials for free on the internet.
replaces 6 books [one for each language]
How the Web has grown! In doing so, and aiding its growth, has been the use and development of several languages. Naturally, Schafer starts with the language that birthed the Web - HTML. Actually this needs its dual ("twin") on a server, http. But Schafer discusses http in a later chapter devoted to CGI.
Hopefully, you should be able to appreciate that HTML is simple. In fact, of all that the book discusses, HTML is the simplest language. Several initial chapters walk you through HTML. It must be stressed that mastery of HTML is needed to make sense of the rest of the book.
The later languages either extend the scope of an HTML file, or they generate the file, roughly speaking. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) lets you easily factor out common definitions that are used across multiple web pages, where you can imagine that each web page corresponds to a file storing it. Schafer explains how to use CSS to simplify management of a set of HTML files. A centralised way to set common fonts and the like. More robust.
But HTML is a declarative language. Good, because laymen can more easily understand and write such languages. It's easier to say what should be done, than how to do it. But for the times when you need more expressive power on the browser, Schafer offers JavaScript. A procedural language that actually has nothing to do with Java. [The coincidence in names was a marketing ploy.]
Schafer does not ignore the server. CGI is given, as the first generation attempt at server side code. Its limitations spawned the use of Perl, PHP and Python for easier parsing of user input and generation of new dynamic pages.
Each of these languages (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Perl, PHP and Python) is often the subject of its own book. No surprise then that Schafer explaining all 6 gave us a book of this length!
(3 reviews)
