Monday, March 22, 2004		Book Review

Book on Web programs that spills on to a CD
Review by Sarabjeet Singh Kanwal
Internet and World Wide Web - How to program by Deitel, Deitel and Goldberg; Pearson Education; Price Rs 495;  Pages 1535.

THE Internet and World Wide Web have created a revolution in software development. This book explains how to make Web pages and use most of the latest Web technologies with them. It begins with the history of computers, the Internet and programming languages. You will read about common Web browsers like Internet Explorer. Search engines, FTP, e-mail and chatting are also mentioned.

A complete chapter is dedicated to the use of Adobe Photoshop for making graphics to be used on Webpages. Readers see sample outputs, as they would appear on computer screens.

How to use DHTML, XHTML and JavaScript for Web pages is another aspect that the book details. XML language, which can be used to create own markup languages, is also discussed. The reader can work with style sheets to give all Webpages the same look and feel. There is an abundance of program codes with outputs. You will find good programming practice to write readable and self-documenting programs. Performance tips help make programs which run faster and occupy least memory space. Read tips to make programs portable and error free.

Macromedia Flash is a cutting-edge multimedia technology that builds interactive animations for the World Wide Web. Besides Flash, the book includes Macromedia Dreamweaver - the leading Web page editing software.

The book also deals in Apache Web Server and Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS), the most commonly used Web servers. The reader is introduced to various databases and Structured Query Language (SQL) for accessing desired data from the database. Microsoft's ASP.NET is the server side software development paradigm. The book uses Jscript .NET as its programming language. Case study delves on building an online message forum using ASP.NET. This case study integrates many Web technologies like XHTML, CSS, ASP.NET, XML and XSLT. Perl and CGI are server side technologies. PHP is also a server side scripting language introduced to you. Cold Fusion MX of Macromedia uses Cold Fusion Markup Language. It is explained with another case study.

A chapter discusses the ways to add audio, video and animation components on the Web pages. The use of Real Player to view multimedia files from the Internet reduces delay by streamlining. Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) provides guidelines for making Web sites accessible to hearing impaired and visually disabled people.

This book contains 29 chapters and a CD accompanying the book has 9 chapters. Chapters on CD are on Structured Graphics ActiveX Control, VB Script, case study of ASP and XML. Python, Java Servlets, Java Server Pages (JSP) can also be explored from CD.