Developing SVG-based Web Applications

Rating:
Summary: A bit misleading
Review: As a web developer, I read this books title, and assumed that it was about programming interactive graphic content for the web. I was, sadly, mistaken. The book assumes you know next to nothing about a computer, much less how to program (every time it suggests you try it gives instructions on how to do so (open text editor, save with .svg extension, open in viewer)). Also there is not a web-app to be found anywhere in the book, amongst the many trivial examples. Certainly, the graphics are cool, and the survey of SVG editors available near the end of the book was useful, but overall, I found this book to be much more basic than the title implied.

Nevertheless, I did find that the book is relatively complete, and though I think the learning curve for SVG is very shallow (especially if you have experience in web development) - this book keeps it that way. Perhaps the book should be re-titled to appeal more to designers, as I think this may in fact, be a much better target audience.

A good effort, but not for everyone.

Rating:
Summary: A bit misleading
Review: As a web developer, I read this books title, and assumed that it was about programming interactive graphic content for the web. I was, sadly, mistaken. The book assumes you know next to nothing about a computer, much less how to program (every time it suggests you try it gives instructions on how to do so (open text editor, save with .svg extension, open in viewer)). Also there is not a web-app to be found anywhere in the book, amongst the many trivial examples. Certainly, the graphics are cool, and the survey of SVG editors available near the end of the book was useful, but overall, I found this book to be much more basic than the title implied.

Nevertheless, I did find that the book is relatively complete, and though I think the learning curve for SVG is very shallow (especially if you have experience in web development) - this book keeps it that way. Perhaps the book should be re-titled to appeal more to designers, as I think this may in fact, be a much better target audience.

A good effort, but not for everyone.

Rating:
Summary: As Easy As Learning HTML
Review: Scalable Vector Graphics is a cool concept that is open source,
resolution independent and uses XML to encode its instructions. You know perhaps how Postscript is resolution independent? One major reason for its becoming the defacto standard for printing hardcopy images. Trouble is, Adobe owns it. Well, after HTML came along, people wondered if there was a way to take the inspiration of Postscript, and apply it in a different context - Web pages. SVG is one such implementation.

Given the inherent visual nature of SVG, and the tag constructs, it looks like HTML and should be as earn to learn. The title of the book gives the prerequisite: Are you already a Web developer? At a minimum, you know HTML.

You do not need to have XML prior to this. In point of fact, suppose you do NOT know XML? You can treat this book as a means of learning XML, with SVG just as a useful example topic. XML deals mostly with data representation, and not usually display. In this way, it is more of an abtraction than HTML. With the latter, when you tweak an HTML page, you get immediate visual feedback. This in no small part helped HTML become successful. But with a typical XML book, you have to work a little harder to decipher your efforts. The neat thing about using this book is that XML becomes as easy as learning HTML!