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Title: Creating Applications with Mozilla by David Boswell, Brian King, Ian Oeschger, Pete Collins, Eric Murphy ISBN: 0-596-00052-9 Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates Pub. Date: September, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $39.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 2.43 (7 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: I found this book well worth having
Comment: This was the first Mozilla XUL book that I read; I now have Nigel McFarlane's book as well. I find it useful to have more than one reference book as I can often find things in one that are not in the other.
I found this book quick and easy to read and a good introduction whilst also going into sufficent detail.
Importantly for me it contains information on how to go about creating a remote application to run over the Internet and using serverside PHP, neither of which have I seen mentioned elsewhere.
The book is not perfect but it is useful and I think some of the other reviewers have been unduly harsh; I am glad that I was not put off.
Rating: 2
Summary: Poorly organized
Comment: I only just got the book, but the people who complained that it doesn't stand up to the usually high O'Reilly standards are spot on. The second chapter, which is all about "getting started" ought to explain basic concepts clearly. Instead it throws out all kinds of mumbo jumbo and forward references like "You could also define this style rule in an external stylesheet and make that stylesheet part of the package for your application, as we do later in this chapter ...." Why? Why should I keep reading to find out? Why does the first chapter of real content (chapter one understandably explains more background on mozilla and XPFE) seem to have a forward reference every third paragraph?
Clearly, the authors did not sit down and make a coherent plan of what the best way to introduce each topic to the neophyte. This stands in stark contrast to the various O'Reilly Perl books that always seem to give the overview in clear terms and then flesh it out, instead of diving into the middle and trying to explain it as you go.
The only reason right now to get this book is because it appears to be the only (or one of the only) ones on the topic at this time. Hopefully _Rapid Application Development with Mozilla_ due out in November this year will get it right.
Rating: 3
Summary: Good reference, but lacks real teaching value.
Comment: I happened to be experimenting with XUL and Mozilla at the time that I ran across this book, so I was very eager to get into it and see if it could help clarify some of the gaping holes in the existing XUL documentation within Mozilla. As an exhaustive reference to XUL and the associated technologies that are used to build Mozilla applications, it was very successful. As a higher level tutorial that explains the relationships between the different technologies and their uses, it was not quite as successful.
Chapters 1-6 lead the reader through the progressive steps required to build and package a Mozilla-based application. The authors create a demo application called xFly which is used as a test bed to show the different features of XUL, CSS, and JavaScript. By the end of Chapter 6, this application contains a tree control, a bunch of sample menus, and various other assorted UI widgets. But it doesn't really _do_ anything. Maybe I'm too picky, but I'd rather see an application that has some function, even if all it does is play tick-tack-toe. Then, to me at lease, it's much clearer how the different pieces would fit together in a "real-world" application.
Chapters 7-12 cover more exotic and difficult aspects of Mozilla
programming such as the Extensible Binding Language (XBL), XPCOM (Mozilla's component object model), and accessing web services from XUL applications. These chapters are very dense in technical details, with good references to online resources for further study. Overall, I found this book to be a very succinct source of accurate information about building applications with Mozilla. Its only weakness seems to be that it focuses too much on low-level implementation details without giving the reader (who may be new to the idea of XML-based GUI
application programming entirely) a good high-level overview of the benefits of this type of development and which technologies serve which purpose. Chapter 1 is the only chapter that explicitly addresses high-level application architecture, and it is only 8 pages long.
The bottom line is that this is a good reference book for people who already know how and why to build applications based on Mozilla, but a not-so-good introduction and tutorial for people who are completely new to the XUL-CSS-JavaScript paradigm of application development.
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Title: Rapid Application Development with Mozilla by Nigel McFarlane ISBN: 0131423436 Publisher: Prentice Hall PTR Pub. Date: 07 November, 2003 List Price(USD): $44.99 |
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Title: Essential XUL Programming by Vaughn Bullard, Kevin T. Smith, Michael C. Daconta ISBN: 0471415804 Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Pub. Date: 20 July, 2001 List Price(USD): $44.99 |
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Title: Netscape® Mozilla¿ Source Code Guide by William R. Stanek ISBN: 0764545884 Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Pub. Date: 09 December, 1999 List Price(USD): $34.99 |
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Title: JavaScript: The Definitive Guide by David Flanagan ISBN: 0596000480 Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates Pub. Date: 15 December, 2001 List Price(USD): $44.95 |
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Title: Practical RDF by Shelley Powers ISBN: 0596002637 Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates Pub. Date: July, 2003 List Price(USD): $39.95 |
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