Rating: 
Summary: Well-written and a Great Guide
Review: I read through Essential XUL, and I think that this is an extremely well-written book. As a developer, I've found that it has been difficult to get a lot of this information from some of the Internet documentation out there, and I'm glad that I can actually have this book to carry around. I also think the JXUL project that is discussed in the book is a good idea.
Rating:
Summary: Great book!
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Great book!
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Salvation from the monotony of UI programming
Review: This is an exceptional "how-to" on a technology that thrills me as a frustrated UI developer. A big frustration to the UI developer is how to be "all things to all people". Usually, the UI developer gets stuck in the middle of a political war over preferences of different users. You build a wonderful application that does some really neat things, and all of your comments about where you put a button. I know that everyone has been there. Users are different and have different interface requirements. XML has brought flexible interfaces between systems, and this is a wonderful example of bringing flexibility to the user. I think this an excellent book for any professional software engineer to read, especially those who specialize in UI development. The toughest thing that we encounter in software is the "that is a wonderful idea, but can you do it." This books shows you how.
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