Dynamic HTML Web Magic at Dominant Systems Book Store

This is a recipe-style how-to book that walks users through a wide variety of Dynamic HTML tricks, from page layout techniques through special effects. The internal design and presentation will be almost identical to other Magic books. Step-by-step instructions for each HTML effect will be heavily illustrated. Each will include notes about which browsers support it, and each will offer variations for other creative uses of the effect.

Customer Reviews & Comments
If I could re-title this book, it would be "How To Go Out Of Your Way To Spend Four Weeks Creating in DHTML What You Could Do In One Day With Flash". That pretty much says it all. My problem with this book is that it goes against the basic concept of software development that says "use the right tool for the job". And let's get real, the DHTML in this book is NOT the right tool. For example, consider the chapters on image animation. The author spends a huge amount of time and effort to show how to create many different graphics and write many different layers in order to glue them together with complex DHTML so that'll animate as one flying bird. That's great, but what did you really accomplish? The user has to download all of those different graphics, which considerably slows down the page. The page is fatter because of all the layers and DHTML to glue them together. And the page will render slower because the browser has to evaluate all the DHTML, load the images, and load the animation. Instead, why not spend one hour using a graphics program to create one animated GIF that loads quickly with *NO* threat of browser incompatibility. And that's the way this entire book read: I bet I can show you a somewhat-decent way of doing anything that animated GIFs or Flash can do, no matter how complex and unrealistic my implementations may be in the real world. That's great as an experiement or research thesis, but so would a book about how to type on a keyboard using only your nose and one ear. Sure it's possible, but who's going to do that?!? This book was an absolute waste of my money. I walked away remembering why Flash and animated GIFs exist and how helpful they can be. If you're looking for a book on building Dynamic web pages, I suggest "DHTML For the World Wide Web" or "JavaScript For The World Wide Web".

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