Review: DHTML Utopia by Langridge
This is the text of my amazon review, I gave it 2 stars. This is featured in my Shelf of Shame.
I got this book looking to find more coverage on how dhtml/ajax works. I got a book very light on details and focused on very broad how-to/cut-and-paste type scripts. So, partly, it was my own fault for not reading the back closely enough - it was never meant for deep coverage.
Even given the premise of the book, it is very light on content. As another reader points out, wide margins and big fonts take up a lot of space. Also, he inists on repeatedly putting the same functions in every example - rather than pointing readers to a website with full source as almost every other book does.
There were a few interesting ideas in the book, which was it’s saving grace. But the organization of the book was the give away, he claims that you can read chapters in any order. His coverage is so high level that there’s no buildup of knowledge, even for his target audience of novice programmers. How can that be, you ask? The explanatations of how things work were very broad and offered no insight to how to use things outside the scope. A book like this, should have been a cheap tiny book, maybe that came with a cd, for ready to use scripts.
If you’re looking for something one step above copy and paste, to garner some basic understanding of what you’re doing, this book may be for you. For anyone with javascript experience looking for something more meaningful this book is definitely not for you. For anyone beginning in javascript looking to actually be able to program on your own, this book is not for you. Zakas’ wrox book was much more in depth even for topics that his book doesn’t profess to cover like CSS.
