Dynamic HTML GUIs
John Wiley & Sons Search John Wiley & Sons by Steven Champeon David S. Fox Search Steven Champeon David S. Fox
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Customer Reviews:
Good book, has great latent value for the seasoning hack
Everyone's description of the book is true, some filling, some waste, but the authors know their stuff and have included much in this book that will help development of large sites and, some would say more importantly, generic DHTML.
This book will increase the scope of most developers skills when it comes to DHTML, only those who are 2 to 3 year veterans (seasoned) of cross-platform DHTML will not benefit (as much! ).
Lots of little techniques are available from this book and together they make up an excellent source of advice for the mechanical design of a site.
Definitely recommendable technically. The writing style is perhaps on the casual side but not bad like others can be.
Encyclopaedic , thought provoking, immediately applicable
This book reveals the history of GUIs and places the choices you are about to make on your job within the context of past mistakes, current ignorance and foreshadowing of the future. This book provides code examples that are immediately applicable and justifies every decision within a historical and a practical context. The authors treat the developer as a well educated, motivated developer who truly wishes to develop interfaces that are human empowering. This book should be required reading before being allowed to purchase a domain name!!!
At Last! A DHTML book oriented to developers!
All I can say is that this book is a breath of fresh air to professionals who are tired of the remedial skill-review, 'for dummies' approach to Internet books. We finally have a DHTML book written by programmers for programmers!
Theory, fundamentals AND working code.
I seldom read "doorstop" techology books -- you know, the 600-1000 page works focused on exhaustive reference and tutorials into some technology. The good ones sit on my desk like a dictionary, waiting for me to look up a particular syntax for something. The bad ones prop up my monitor.
This book, however, does neither. Champeon does great job doing what it's advertised as doing: You can use his work to step you through the daunting task of building interfaces to Web applications that work in both browsers. With a supporting Web site for downloading the code he refers to in the book, you'll have a complete package for taking the next step in dynamic development for the Web.
But he doesn't stop there. While so many technical books give you the nuts and bolts to build your projects, so few give you anything else. Champeon realizes that this is only the end of a long process of understanding the reasons WHY you should build sites the way he suggests. To drive home his point, he digs into the history of interface theory: from the early command-line interfaces, to modern GUIs, and now the advent of powerful tools displayed through hypertext interfaces.
Without this understanding of the fundamentals of good, user-centered design, any interface you build will fail. This book will give you that understanding, plus to tools to put that knowledge into practice.
If only all technical authors understood this...
What a nice paperweight! 
Be wary of any DHTML book that starts off with a chapter called "what is a user interface?" or one that starts off with 15 pages of descriptions & screenshots of UNIX commands. While the authors might have some qualified insight into GUI design with DHTML, most of it is hidden behind pages and pages of irrelevent filler. - It makes a great paperweight, but I'd hate to have to read it!
