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Internet & World Wide Web How to Program (2nd Edition)

Internet & World Wide Web How to Program (2nd Edition)

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Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Understandable and Prcatical "How-To" Manual
Review: One of very few assigned textbooks which has proven practical both inside and outside of the classroom. The authors provide numerous examples on each topic presented, and the progression of topics within the book is logical. The material is relevant to modern technologies, and this book is actually fun to work through. Where errors or difficultiesd have been found in the book or the enclosed CD, the Deitel website has been all that was necessary to fill the gaps. Hats off to Deitel!

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: A confusing melange of things (none very helpful...)
Review: Perhaps I'm jaundiced by being somewhat intelligent and having a better than adequate knowledge of programming. I bought this book hoping it would lead to new insights into programming in some popular languages (VBScript, JavaScript, Perl, ASP, etc.) and perhaps show me some tricks I could use in my everyday work.

What I got was a heavy (it's like a very expensive brick), thick, badly organized, poorly laid out doorstop. There is a lot of information in it and that's perhaps its biggest problem. It can't seem to teach simple, straightforward programming, but hops and skips around the various styles of each language, without adequately exploring good, basic programming skills.

Occasionally you glean a useful bit of information, but the examples are confusing often, not explained fully, and fairly dense. You really never have enough time to take in what you've learned before you're off to the next example.

Do yourself a big favor and spend the money you'd have sunk into this atrocious tome and buy a couple of smaller books on your main areas of interest. You'll learn the topics better and you won't get strained muscles from lifting the books.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Heavy
Review: This book is good for beginners who want to learn HTML and the basics of web design and programming. It's well written.

However, because there are a lot of nice colorful illustrations, the book is just plain heavy. It weighs a lot because the publisher used some strange type of paper that seems to have plastic in it.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: The world (wide web) does not consist of MS only
Review: Whereas I am used to get only excellent books on programming of the Deitel Publisher, the book on Internet programming is a bitter disappointment. No one who would like to publish anything on the Internet - professionally or not - should seriously consider using this book to build her/his web page. Why not?

Simply because the book pretends that the world consists of Microsoft Windows users running Microsoft Internet Explorer as their sole browser application. Netscape is mentioned in the book acouple of times whereas there is a whole chapter on IE. (Or, consider the section "Outlook Express and Electronic Mail". Hey, if you have to write about the world's most insecure mail program at all, why don't you at least call this chapter "Electronic Mail and Outlook Express"?) But that's not even the main problem yet.
The whole section on DHTML (6 chapters) is specifically tailored to MS IE running on Windows. It is not even mentioned that the 'solutions' presented in this book might not work on Netscape or on any browser on the Mac platform. The same applies for the sections on VisualBasic and - subsequently - on ASP.
Likewise, in the chapter on servers, naturally the Microsoft products are discussed prominently. Apache (certainly the most popular - and probably also the far better - server) is mentioned in a small section. (Btw: Conterary to what is claimed in the book, Apache DOES provide ASP support, but not with VB but with Perl.)

"The book concentrates on the principles of good software engineering [...]", but unfortunately not on the good principles of software engineering. Not only is this book an obvious supporter of Microsoft's monopoly tendencies, it is also inadequate - after all, which serious web programmer wants her/his web pages to look dilettantish on any platform/browser other than MS's. The huge differences of platforms and browsers is a deplorable (and painstaking) fact of web programming. With such books, you're not going to master it.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: An Ideal Starting Point for Web Based Education
Review: Yes, as other reviewers of the book have pointed out, the book is definitely biased towards Microsoft products. From my point of view, this is fine as it reflects the state of the industry where Microsoft products are dominant. The book does an outstanding job with its breadth of coverage. The book takes the reader from the client side with a discussion of browsers (IE), xhtml, cascasding style sheets, javascript and xml to the server side with a discussion of ASP, VBScript, SQL and a number of scripting languages. The book provides an excellent undergraduate text for learning how all of the client and server pieces fit together. After completing the text, the reader can visit a number of excellent web sites referenced in the text to get an in depth understanding of a particular area.


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