The Web Programming CD Bookshelf, Version 1.0

Rating:
Summary: Everything you need, all in one place
Review: By M. Todd Lassich
Bishop Eastern Sierra Macintosh User Group (beSMUG)

I remember when I was first learning to program in HyperCard. I still have all of the books I bought, hoping someday they'll port my beloved, easy-to-use programming language to OS X, and my 300,000+ lines of code will again see the light of day. As I look at all these books-$400 dollars worth and taking up most of a 4-foot shelf-I remember that each had its strong points and that many times I needed to cross-reference the information in more than one of them to get my code working properly.

Now I program for the web, and I have an assortment of manuals, texts and CD-ROMS that are rapidly falling out of date and are sometimes tougher to use than searching for a good tutorial on the net.

Enter O'Reilly's Web Programming CD Bookshelf, six bestselling web programming books on a single CD-ROM: Webmaster in a Nutshell, Programming PHP, Web Database Applications with PHP & MySQL, PHP Cookbook, JavaScript: The Definitive Guide and Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference. Up-to-date and all in one place, I think one of the greatest features of this collection is that the entire library goes into my CD-ROM drive, not piled all over my desk and lying open on the floor around my office chair.

4,668 pages in HTML format, fully searchable and cross-referenced:

Anyone who needs these types of reference materials knows that you don't actually read them cover-to-cover (at least not all at once); you refer to them as needed for specific information. This is where the "Search all books" option from the Home page really comes in handy.

I had been on a fruitless search for more than two weeks (as time permitted) for the answer to a puzzle involving localizing the date and time for visitors to a website. None of the tutorials I could find were very helpful, and the ready-made scripts I found didn't address the problem either. 15 minutes after opening the box and popping the CD-ROM in my drive (and admiring the slick, easy interface), I queried the search with "date and time" and found my answer in item number six of the results, "Calculating Time with Time Zones (PHP Cookbook)," just a single click away. With the step-by-step instructions, I had my script working in minutes.

Navigating and browsing the works is easy as well, all indices are hyperlinked, and every page contains links to a search for that specific book as well as to the book's index, the Home page and the other five books. "Next" and "Previous" buttons appear at both the top and bottom of each page. In addition to the search all books option on the Home page, there's also a hyperlinked master index.

...

Rating:
Summary: Web Development in a Nutshell
Review: I have to admit; I love direct, hard hitting, honesty.

The authors of one of the six books contained in this series say it all when they introduce their book with this comment:

"This book is by impatient writers for impatient readers, so don't expect much history or analysis here, just a basic tour of how everything fits together."

I cannot improve on that. Long after you pass your certification exams and place those trophy books on the shelf to collect dust, this collection will sit dog-eared at your work station.

Rating:
Summary: index works but search does not
Review: It has a lot of content, but buyer beware, there are compatibility problems with the search engine and browser, specifically from the CD:

This search engine works with most Java-enabled browsers supporting version Java 1.1.2 or later. It has problems running with Mozilla 0.9 and 1.0 and Netscape 7 on Mac OS 9...

Well Mozilla essentially means all of the new Netscape releases also (since its Mozilla based). I don't know what Microsoft-only planet the idiots who wrote the search engine came from, but given the material they should have considered that a bulk of the user base is on Unix and Linux, and DOES NOT USE MS BROWSERS. They should have advertised this fact before hand.

Rating:
Summary: The Web Programming Cd Bookshelf: Version 1.0
Review: One of the biggest deterrents in computers is questions. It is funny how one question can lead to a dozen more. I call this the snowball effect. I discovered that I spend hours daily researching for answers. About a month ago, I came across O'reilly's Bookshelves. I thought to myself. Here we go all the answers that I want all wrapped up and discounted. Well little did I know what came in the bookshelves. I started reading and noticed a few examples that I could use. So I popped in the CD so I could to try these examples out and up pop the menu. There it was right below the list of books. In blue bold letters "Search All Books." I thought to myself no way. That would be too easy. Sure enough I could not only search individual books but all of them at once. You don't even realize the power and speed that gives you. With the use of the CD Bookshelves, my problem solving time has decreased approximately 75%. I recommend any and all of the O'reilly CD Bookshelves.

Rating:
Summary: A great resource for anyone working with the web.
Review: There are many, many books out there on computers; my local bookstore has racks and racks of books on the subject. But how does one collect a good library of books that will help him out, without breaking the bank. O'Reilly hits the spot with it's CD Bookshelf collection. The series offers readers five to six books on CD and one hardcopy book for much less than the cost of those same books in hardcopy. The newest collection in this series is The Web Programming CD Bookshelf. This collection covers most of what one needs to know to start programming on the web and is complete in coverage of topics, from HTML to PHP, web servers to JavaScript.

The hardcopy book in this collection is Webmaster in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition (webmaster). Webmaster is a complete reference for being a Webmaster. Each chapter in this book is a deferent area of web technology, ranging from HTML, broken down by tag, to Apache, with details of each of the major modules. I was glad to see this book as the hardcopy book in this collection; it is perfectly laid out for getting at the information you need without having to delve into text descriptions or examples.

I will be reviewing each of the books on CD over the next few weeks, but as a collection I have to say that O'Reilly made good choices. Since they decided to go the PHP route of web programming the three PHP books included will get the reader from novice hello-world, up to a database driven web application. The two Definitive References do live up to their name. The one thing that I thought was missing was Perl; the only perl is discussed in Webmaster in the CGI.pm chapter.

The price of the collection is steep ... but considering what you are getting I think the price is very reasonable. If you don't already have these books and are looking at getting into web programming as a profession or hobby, this is the one stop collection for you.