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Michael J. Ross writes "Like all major programming languages, JavaScript can be extended in functionality through the use of libraries, such as jQuery, which is currently seeing tremendous popularity and enhancement in the Web development community. Designers and developers who want to learn how to use jQuery for creating rich user interfaces through client-side JavaScript are advised to begin their journey to jQuery proficiency by reading one of the many books dedicated to this powerful JavaScript resource — such as jQuery Cookbook: Solutions & Examples for jQuery Developers." Read below for the rest of Michael's review. jQuery Cookbook author Various authors pages 480 pages publisher O'Reilly Media rating 9/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN 978-0596159771 summary An extensive collection of solutions to jQuery problems. This book was published by O'Reilly Media on 19 November 2009, under the ISBN 978-0596159771, and is authored by no fewer than 19 contributors — all quite knowledgeable of JavaScript and jQuery — and edited by one of those contributors, Cody Lindley. On the publisher's page for the book, visitors can read the book's description, table of contents, and errata, of which there are 22 as of this writing, although none have been confirmed by the authors or publisher. Visitors can also download all of the sample code used in the book, in addition to the eight code demos for Chapter 13. Lastly, prospective buyers can purchase the print version of the book, the electronic one (in PDF, ePub, and Mobi format), or the two combined at a considerable discount — or read the book as part of Safari Books Online.

jQuery Cookbook's 480 pages are organized into 18 chapters, covering a wide range of topics: the basics, element selection, utilities, dimensions, effects, events, forms, plug-ins, user interfaces, theming, Ajax, data formats, and testing. Lindley starts off the first chapter, titled "jQuery Basics," by presenting the advantages, philosophy, and organization of jQuery. Readers will likely chuckle at his suggestion that they memorize the jQuery API outline, which comprises two pages. The many code snippets are quite helpful, but they are needlessly long, partly because most of them contain far more HTML elements than are needed to illustrate the point, and also because each snippet contains the DOCTYPE and head tags, among others — often taking up more lines on the page than does the code pertinent to the topic at hand. This pointless and space-wasting redundancy is seen also in a few of the chapters that follow. As well, some of the passages in the first chapter's narrative are oddly phrased, frequently requiring a rereading of the material, while others could be made more concise. Additionally, some of the sample code contains bugs, which fortunately are detailed on the errata page mentioned earlier. The second chapter, "Selecting Elements with jQuery," presents numerous techniques for specifying elements within the DOM. The only obvious blemish in the material is in section 2.4, where the author refers to animated elements, but with absolutely no explanation as to what that means; countless new readers may assume he is referring to animated GIFs. Nonetheless, these two chapters form a helpful foundation for the rest of the manuscript.

The third chapter, "Beyond the Basics," gets off to a questionable start with the assertion that "jQuery can [] extend jQuery to infinite possibilities," which sounds like a line wisely rejected for the movie Toy Story. Yet the discussion continues on a solid footing, as it covers more advanced techniques for working with selected elements. Some of the discussion overlaps material presented in the previous two chapters, but it is always worthwhile to hear critical concepts explained from a different perspective. However, section 3.8, which briefly introduces jQuery plug-ins, is out of place; that material should be folded into Chapter 12, which focuses on that topic. The fourth chapter may be brief, but it explains several jQuery utility methods. Most of the code snippets use a format of "(function($) (jQuery);" — whose usage and advantages are not explained in this chapter, nor any earlier ones. This points up one of the key downsides of having almost every chapter of a programming book written by separate authors: readers can be confused or misled by disparities in coding practices, especially when the reasoning behind them is not given. The title of the fifth chapter, "Faster, Simpler, More Fun," is a bit misleading, because the authors don't explain how to make one's jQuery programming simpler or more fun, but they do provide a great deal of information on troubleshooting, performance optimization, and jQuery coding practices, including those pertaining to progressive enhancement, accessibility, and unobtrusiveness. Section 5.19 lacks a figure showing the menu being discussed, but that's the only obvious flaw.

The remaining chapters are dedicated to more specific aspects of jQuery programming, including the important topics of page layout as well as element positioning and sizing, discussed in Chapter 6. The subsequent chapter delves into effects, which is one of the more exciting topics in the jQuery realm. Even though a portion of the readers may be put off by the trickiness of the code, the material does demonstrate some of the powerful capabilities of jQuery effects — which in conjunction with HTML5 may easily encroach on areas of client-side programming formerly dominated by Adobe Flash. Throughout Chapter 7, most if not all places where the author refers to the "mouse," he apparently means the "mouse pointer." Events play a critical role in JavaScript software, and even more so for code that is mostly jQuery — thus the value of chapters 8 and 9, which examine basic and advanced event handling. The next pair of chapters discuss a variety of techniques for enhancing HTML forms, from scratch and through the use of jQuery plug-ins. The sample source code is better commented than what is seen elsewhere in the book, and the explanations are quite good. The subsequent chapter focuses on jQuery plug-ins, beyond their usage within HTML forms, and briefly explains how to create your own plug-ins and how to perform unit testing on them.

Because JavaScript is primarily a client-side technology, it should come as no surprise that jQuery can prove an outstanding tool in crafting user interfaces for Web sites and Web-based applications. Chapters 13 through 15 explore such topics as drop-down menus, sliding panels, rotating images, modal windows, tooltips, the jQuery UI, and how to style jQuery UI widgets, a.k.a., theming. No Web interface is an island, and over the years there have emerged a number of data formats and protocols for utilizing those formats for transmitting information between browsers and servers — such as Ajax, XML, JSON, and JSONP — covered in Chapter 16. Finally, the last two chapters of the book are geared more to testing and deployment, and less so to interface design and development. The topics covered include techniques for persisting data in the browser, managing large amounts of code and data for major software projects, automating the unit testing of jQuery code, testing callbacks and user actions, grouping and selecting tests, and more.

Overall, jQuery Cookbook starts off with some basics, and only then moves on to higher-level concepts and related use cases. However, the book is ostensibly aimed at beginners and intermediate JavaScript programmers, but the former group may find the ideas difficult to grasp fully, despite the introductory chapters — because some of the techniques are fairly advanced, they involve terminology unfamiliar to anyone new to jQuery, and some of that terminology is not explained. On the other hand, the recipes are generally well written and clear, supplemented with properly tested and working code. Consequently, anyone who takes the time to work through the examples patiently, should be well rewarded.

Because of its coverage of a wide range of topics, jQuery Cookbook can be used not only as a learning aid, but in some respects also as a reference — and in this regard the book's index will be quite useful. In light of the considerable length of the manuscript, reading it from stem to stern would involve an investment of time — especially if one were to work through all of the examples and try them out in one's own development environment — quite easily, in fact, since all of it can be downloaded from the publisher's site. Most of it, however, is organized as plain text files, and not HTML files; and no reason is provided for this annoying choice.

In terms of the layout and appearance of the text and figures, one flaw is that in countless lines throughout the book, the words are jammed together, making it difficult to read the text rapidly. In fact, some of these lines almost look like single words. This is also seen in the subheads, an excellent example of which can be found on page 149: "Solution2:ChangingthehrefAttributeoftheStylesheetThat'sResponsible." Unfortunately, the same is true for much of the source code, but in a different sense: Operators and variables are jammed together, clearly illustrating the need for whitespace in making code more readable. Some of the code is excessively long (noted earlier), and the authors are inconsistent as to whether their JavaScript is placed at the end of the body element or in the header element. Nonetheless, the sample code is generally of good quality.

There is another aspect related to not only this book but all other computer programming books for which individual chapters are written by different authors: jQuery Cookbook does not seem to be a single book, but instead a collection of books that were bundled together because of a common thread, namely, jQuery. This leads to some of the problems mentioned earlier, such as discrepancies in coding techniques and formatting — from which the beginning reader is supposedly learning best practices. On the other hand, the multi-author approach makes it possible for each major subject area to be handled by one or more writers who are expert in that particular area — which in turn results in a better product overall, even if one or two of the chapters are noticeably weaker than the others.

The book contains a number of copyediting flaws not listed on the aforementioned errata page: "elevated" should instead read "alleviated" (page 12); "or [its] alias" (13); "could change" should read "could be changed" (26); "jQuery('a')removeAttr('title')" is missing a "." (30); "'blue')" is missing a terminating ";" (50); "season in" should read "season" (56); "was contained" should read "is contained" (144); "position: absolute" in the narrative should not be broken between two lines (156); "great[er] than" (157); "equal[-]sized panels" (160); "only running" should read "only runs" (165); "still support[s]" (168), "#source5txt" should read "#source4txt" (217); and at this point I stopped recording errata. Also, in countless places in most of the chapters, semicolons are used where dashes are called for, and vice versa. O'Reilly's copyeditors should have detected and fixed those errors prior to publication.

Yet most of these blemishes are of little significance. What really counts is the overall value provided to the reader: Usable for both learning and reference, jQuery Cookbook delivers a tasty buffet of programming essentials, best practices, illustrative examples, optimization tips, and other information of value to JavaScript developers who wish to spice up their Web creations with jQuery.

Michael J. Ross is a freelance website developer and writer.

You can purchase jQuery Cookbook: Solutions & Examples for jQuery Developers from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

littleidea writes "Ruby In Practice is like a sampler platter that picks up where The Ruby Way leaves off. Depending on your tastes each of the different offerings are delicious, but sometimes leave you wishing you had a whole order of just that. Then again, if you eat the whole thing, chances are you won't be hungry." Keep reading for the rest of Andrew's review. Ruby In Practice author Jeremy McAnally, Assaf Arkin with Yehuda Katz, David Black, Gregory Brown, Peter Cooper and Luke Melia pages 335 publisher Manning rating 8 reviewer Andrew Clay Shafer ISBN 1933988479 summary A cookbook style reference with Ruby code examples for systems integration, monitoring, messaging, web development, processing documents and databases in a clear problem/solution format. I really jumped headfirst into Ruby and the Ruby ecosystem when I started working on Puppet around Fall 2007. I had spent years writing code in compiled imperative and object oriented languages and just dabbled with interpreted languages before that. I've met Jeremy and several of the authors of Ruby In Practice at Ruby conferences since then.

I had a particularly hard time rating this book. If you have just learned the Ruby basics and you need to hook up your jabber server to a message queue that will spawn workers that interact with RESTful web services exposing indexed logs to twitter by tomorrow, then this book is a 10. If you are a hard core Rubyist plugged into the Ruby ecosystem, and 'Ruby In Practice' is what you do all the time, then this book is probably a 6, useful and enjoyable but hard to recommend. I'm somewhere in the middle, so I'm giving the book an 8.

The books starts out with the premise that the reader can read Ruby code. I wouldn't call the style 'code heavy' but this book is definitely 'code ample'. If you haven't been through the Pickaxe or at least a Ruby primer of some sort, be prepared to spend some time head scratching and googling before all the code syntax makes sense. That being said, you don't need to understand the subtleties of 'yield' or 'inject' to understand the examples and the book does a reasonably good job of walking through and explaining them. The exceptions to that are some of the examples involving Rails make the assumption that the reader is familiar with those idioms, which is probably fair statistically speaking and those bits can be filled in rather quickly with one of the many books on the topic or your search engine of choice.

The book credits a number of Rubyists with contributions for each of the sections. This makes for some noticeable variation in the stylistic presentation from topic to topic. As I alluded to earlier, each of the sections is more of a taste of a topic than a full exploration, but there are also references to the resources one would need to pursue each topic more fully.

The book starts out with chapter on 'Why Ruby' followed by an attempt to convert readers to become 'Test Infected', then the real Ruby fun begins in chapter 3. The first example is scaling images, stuffing them in Amazon S3 and printing the link to Twitter in 30 something lines of code. If you don't understand Ruby syntax and passing blocks, you will probably be a little lost here, but the good news is: if you take the time to sort out these first examples the rest of the code in the book should be relatively accessible. The application domain will vary throughout the book, but the level required to understand the ideas expressed in the code remains relatively constant. (which one might argue is one of the strengths of Ruby as well)

By this point, the rest of the book basically follows this pattern, discussion on a technology topic, gem install, code examples, links to more resources. I'm not going to list all the topics, though I alluded to many of them when I discussed the rating. (Here's the TOC to give you some idea.) The book definitely covers ground.

There is some really choice stuff in there and I definitely learned things, but there are a few things that are presented through Ruby colored glasses (as one would probably expect). The one that will always stick out is 'Say goodbye to dependency hell!' in reference to setting up a gem repository and using RubyGems (gems is Ruby's network library/package manager, similar to CPAN for perl or apt for Debian Linux) . I had a little chuckle and eye roll at that one. (Sorry Jeremy)

One quick note, and this is a comment about the Ruby ecosystem as much as anything, Ruby libraries change relatively quickly. On the one hand, gems are mostly up to date and tracking new versions of whatever they integrate with, on the other, this can sometimes break backwards compatibility. I didn't run every line of code in the book, but I played around with a good portion of it. There were a few gem updates which were not compatible with the code in the book. The twitter gem in particular had non-backward compatible changes to authentication (to support OAuth). I was able to get the example working with a few minutes of Google and looking at the code, but that might have taken longer and been frustrating if I didn't have a Ruby background. Ruby In Practice provides enough context and information that you can probably find the maintainer or community for a project without much trouble if you really get stuck.

I would strongly recommend this book to someone who has come to Ruby through Rails and is ready to learn more about what is possible with the language or someone who is coming from another language background with experience and perspective on things like stomp servers or Lucene and who's interest in dynamic languages has been piqued (if you have a background in any OO language, a simple primer is probably enough to make this book accessible. Also, you should remember irb, the interactive ruby interpreter, is your friend.) Anyone in either of those groups will get working examples and resources that could realistically be used in useful applications right away.

You can purchase Ruby In Practice from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Michael J. Ross writes "There are countless content management systems (CMSs) available for building websites, and they offer varying levels of built-in functionality. But once a site developer has successfully installed any given CMS, a critical form of help (or hindrance) is the CMS's documentation, which for some CMSs is quite impressive, and for others absolutely atrocious. Joomla is a powerful and popular choice for Web developers, but can be daunting to newbies confused by its non-intuitive menu structure and restrictive content hierarchy. The documentation for Joomla is frequently criticized, for various reasons, and that may largely account for the popularity of third-party books — such as Barrie M. North's Joomla! 1.5: A User's Guide, now in its second edition." Read on for the rest of Michael and Ethelyn's review. Joomla! 1.5: A User's Guide, 2nd Edition author Barrie M. North pages 480 publisher Prentice Hall rating 9/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross and Ethelyn Holmes ISBN 978-0137012312 summary A comprehensive introduction to creating sites using Joomla. The book was published by Prentice Hall, on 1 June 2009, under the ISBN 978-0137012312. Just as with its predecessor, this updated edition spans 480 pages, and the material is grouped into 12 chapters: an introduction to CMSs in general and Joomla in particular; downloading and installing Joomla; basic Joomla administration; content management using Joomla; menus and navigation; enhancing Joomla functionality with extensions, components, modules, plug-ins, and templates; creation of content via the back-end and front-end; attracting Web traffic using SEO, referrals, and other techniques; how to create pure CSS templates; and building example websites for a school, a restaurant, and a blog. The book wraps up with four appendices on getting assistance with any Joomla development hurdles; four separate Joomla case studies; an introduction to SEO concepts; and installing WampServer.

On the book's Web page, the publisher makes available a description of the book, excerpts from Amazon.com reviews, the table of contents, and a sample chapter — "Creating Pure CSS Templates in Joomla!" — as both an online article and as a downloadable PDF file. There are also links for purchasing the print version, and for reading the Safari Books online version.

In conjunction with the book, Prentice Hall has published a DVD training course, titled Fundamentals of Joomla!, under the ISBN 978-0137017812. It consists of 13 lessons, spanning more than nine hours of video instruction. The DVD includes a bonus chapter explaining how to set up a membership site, not covered in the print book. The DVD disc is accompanied by a 128-page book, which includes all of the PHP and CSS code used in the training, plus additional material. As of this writing, Barnes & Noble is selling Joomla! 1.5: A User's Guide, 2nd Edition and the video training course bundled together. Anyone purchasing the video course should be aware that Lesson #6 on the DVD has a compression problem, which causes a small lag between the audio and video streams. In response to this, Prentice Hall uploaded that particular lesson as a free download to the product's site, under the "Updates" tab. A multimedia training course such as this may be the ideal tool for someone who finds printed technical books to be rather dry, and prefers learning from audiovisual material.

In this review, we will be examining both the book and the DVD training course, as the two complement one another.

Barrie North is well regarded in the Joomla community, and for good reason. He frequently blogs about Joomla on the website of Compass Design, a consulting firm specializing in Joomla Web design and SEO. Joomla developers consider Compass Design's site a source for some of the most up-to-date information on the subject. Barrie also founded Joomlashack, a noted provider of Joomla templates and customization services. He has more than 15 years of Internet experience as a Web designer, plus over a decade of classroom teaching experience and curriculum development expertise. He consults on Web marketing, search engine optimization, usability, and standards compliance for Joomla. He's also a former member of the Joomla Design and Documentation Working Groups.

The title of his book's first chapter, "Content Management Systems and an Introduction to Joomla!," fairly describes what the reader will find. As a CMS, Joomla's primary function is to organize and present all the content stored in a site's database, avoiding the problems in the past of static HTML files. This chapter presents Joomla's out-of-the-box features and delineates its various parts, templates, and modules. The DVD mentioned above shows the differences between constructing an ordinary Web page with Dreamweaver and constructing one with Joomla. People who learn best visually should be pleased with this demonstration, as well as Barrie North's teaching approach. He holds one's attention with a friendly yet informative conversational style. This first chapter provides an in-depth tutorial that explains how Joomla displays its content articles, and how the developer can organize them into a hierarchical structure. It details how to plan and organize the content and user experience for the site. It also explains the hierarchy structure currently used in Joomla — sections and categories — and how to best structure content into them for small and large sites.

The second chapter, "Downloading and Installing Joomla!," gives the reader a very detailed explanation on how to get up and running with Joomla. It explains where one can find the most current Joomla files; how to unpack these files on a home computer or into a remote Web hosting account; how to use the Joomla Installation Wizard; and how one can support the Joomla project. Barrie states that the worst part of the Joomla installation process is setting up the MySQL database, and uploading all the files to a remote server. But for anyone who has performed those tasks with other software technologies, the process should not pose a problem.

Chapter 3, "Joomla! Administration Basics," shows how the power of the Joomla site administration system, despite its simplicity. Compared to such site administration systems as those for WebLogic and Oracle AS, Joomla's system is a piece of cake. Reader should find the DVD especially helpful during the presentation of the back-end, front-end, control panels, and menus — especially the demonstration and explanation of such topics as articles, the front page, sections, categories, and modules. Barrie also gives tips on how to import and export users to Joomla, and about language extensions.

The fourth chapter, "Content Is King: Organizing Your Content," is a substantial and key chapter for those building a site with Joomla. It delves into Joomla's so-called "managers": the Article Manager, Frontpage Manager, Section Manager, Category Manager, and Module Manager. The author explains how to organize content logically, and the role of components and modules. Someone new to Joomla could otherwise find the many components and modules confusing. Of course, one can play around with them, but it is much more efficient to learn what one is doing from an expert. He demonstrates the Custom HTML module very well, and in the DVD walks the viewer through the development of a site using it.

Creating menus and navigation in a CMS is often perplexing to the uninitiated, and that's the topic of Chapter 5. It covers how to work with menu items, and clears up the issue about how to get rid of the dreaded "Welcome to the Frontpage." It also gets into managing modules (as opposed to Chapter 4's managing module content). Barrie North states that menus are perhaps the core of a Joomla site. In a static HTML site, they merely serve as navigation; in a Joomla site, they not only serve that purpose, but also determine the layout of what a dynamic page will look like and what content will appear on that page when the visitor navigates to it. The relationships among menus, menu items, pages, and modules, are perhaps the most confusing aspect of Joomla. Newbies can find daunting why some menu content shows up in articles, and then how to get rid of it. In this chapter, the reader learns how to create a navigation scheme that works for a new site.

Chapter 6, "Extending Joomla!," explains why extensions are essential to any well-functioning Joomla site. Rare is the Joomla-powered website that has no additional functionality, beyond the basics. In the world of Joomla, the term "extension" collectively describes components, modules, plugins, and languages. There are many hundreds available, both free and commercially from third-party providers. This chapter covers the Joomla 1.5 core templates — Khepri, Milkyway, JA Purity, and Beez — as well as how to use third-party templates.

In Chapter 7, "Expanding Your Content: Articles and Editors," the author returns to the critical topic of content management — specifically, WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editing, and how it relates to the backend with what Joomla refers to as Managers, Administrators, and Super Administrators. Barrie North then examines how authors, editors, and publishers can manage content through the front-end, as well as how administrators can set various permissions through the Menu Managers. This is critical for the site developer who wants users to be able to update content in a controlled manner, without breaking other things (inadvertently or otherwise!). Quite useful is Joomla's "global checkout" feature, which allows only one user at a time the ability to lock and then edit articles, and, if necessary, fix problems with checked-out articles.

The most attractive and powerful Joomla site in the world will be useless without visitors. Chapter 8, "Getting Traffic to Your Site," benefits from the author's knowledge and experience in online marketing and search engine optimization. For instance, he explains why the developer should discourage clients who ask for Flash-heavy sites, because pages loaded down with Flash elements can discourage traffic, for various reasons. In the DVD training material, he presents a step-by-step process of bringing traffic to an example site, using Wordtracker and Google tools. He also shows how to use Google advertising tools such as AdWords and AdSense. Interestingly, Barrie North does not put too much stock in keywords and metadata, but rather emphasizes the use of page titles as traffic magnets. He argues in both the DVD and the book that while email blasts may be effective and popular marketing tools, they should be used with caution. He also covers how blogs are another useful method for bringing traffic to one's sites.

The final four chapters in the book are all hands-on application of concepts and lessons covered in the earlier part of the book — specifically, how to create pure CSS templates, and how to create the three sample sites (for a school, a restaurant, and a blog).

Appendix A provides information on getting help with Joomla. If one is interested in seeing how Joomla is used in the real world, then Appendix B should prove valuable, because it offers information on Joomla's usage for commercial and government websites. Appendix C provides a quick overview of search engine optimization. Appendix D goes into detail on WampServer installation, with corresponding illustrations.

The book contains some errata: "Cpanel" (pages 25, 27, and 289), and "add fee" (should read "ad fee"; page 218). Those errata were present in the first edition, and even pointed out to the publisher in an earlier review.

The book's material is organized so that the reader can utilize it as a tutorial, reading from cover to cover, or skim through and take what is needed at the moment. The introductory ideas in the earlier chapters are developed and built upon to help the reader understand more advanced concepts later on. The book can also be used as a reference. For instance, if the reader desires a quick overview of what newsletter extensions are available, Chapter 6 provides that information. Lastly, the appendices contain valuable extra information about various aspects of Joomla. The target audience does not have to understand PHP in order to read this book or work through the many examples. Each example is presented in a clear step-by-step fashion. If a reader were to implement all of the examples in her development environment, then she would gain the skills to be able to build a substantial website. The DVD has an extra chapter on building a membership site. If the reader would like to go into the business of creating Joomla templates, the author even has a chapter showing how to do just that.

Joomla! 1.5: A User's Guide, 2nd Edition is to be recommended, particularly when matched with the DVD training course. Together they form a valuable reference guide and self-teaching tool, for newbies as well as seasoned website developers.

Michael J. Ross is a freelance website developer and writer. Ethelyn Holmes is a software and website developer — primarily using Java / J2EE and Joomla.

You can purchase Joomla! 1.5: A User's Guide, 2nd Edition from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Michael J. Ross writes "Slow Web page loading can discourage visitors to a site more than any other problem, regardless of how attractive or feature-rich the given site might be. Consequently, many Web developers hope to achieve faster response times using AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), since only portion(s) of an AJAX page need to be reloaded. But for many rich Internet applications (RIAs), such potential performance gains can be lost as a result of non-optimized JavaScript, graphics, and CSS files. Steve Souders — a Web performance expert previously at Yahoo and now with Google — addresses these topics in his second book, Even Faster Web Sites: Performance Best Practices for Web Developers." Read on for the rest of Michael's review. Even Faster Web Sites author Steve Souders pages 254 pages publisher O'Reilly Media rating 8/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN 978-0596522308 summary Advanced techniques for improving website performance. The book was published by O'Reilly Media on 18 June 2009, under the ISBN 978-0596522308. The publisher makes available a Web page, where visitors can purchase the print and electronic versions of the book (as well as a bundle of the two), read the book online as part of the Safari library service, and check the reported errata — comprising those confirmed by the author (of which there are currently two) and any unconfirmed errors (all six of which are valid, though the fifth one may be a coincidence). In a break with traditional practice among technical publishers nowadays, there is no sample chapter available, as of this writing.

In many ways, this second book is similar to Steve's previous one, High Performance Web Sites: It presents methods of enhancing the performance of websites, with a focus on client-side factors. It is fairly slender (this one is 254 pages), relative to most programming books nowadays, and the material is organized into 14 chapters. However, unlike its predecessor, Even Faster Web Sites emphasizes generally more advanced topics, such as script splitting, coupling, blocking, and chunking (which to non-developers may sound like a list of the more nefarious techniques in professional hockey). This second book also has employed a team approach to authorship, such that six of the chapters are written by contributing authors. In his preface, Steve notes that the 14 chapters are grouped into three broad areas: JavaScript performance (Chapters 1-7), network performance (Chapters 8-12), and browser performance (Chapters 13-14). The book concludes with an appendix in which he presents his favorite tools for performance analysis, organized into four types of applications: packet sniffers, Web development tools, performance analyzers, and some miscellaneous applications.

In the first chapter, "Understanding Ajax Performance," guest author Douglas Crockford briefly describe some of the key trade-offs and principles of optimizing applications, and how JavaScript now plays a pivotal role in that equation — as websites nowadays are designed to operate increasingly like desktop programs. On pages 2 and 3, he uses some figures to illustrate fixed versus variable overhead, and the dangers of attempting to optimize the wrong portions of one's code. By the way, the so-called "axes" are not axes, or even Cartesian grid lines, but simply levels. Aside from its choppy narrative style and a pointless religious reference in the first paragraph, the material serves as a thought-provoking springboard for what follows. Chapter 2, titled "Creating Responsive Web Applications," was written by Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer, who discuss response times, user perception of them, techniques for measuring latency, browser threads, Web Workers, Google Gears, timers, and memory issues. The material is neatly explained, although Figure 2-2 is quite confusing; moreover, both of the figures on that page should not have been made Mac- and Firefox-specific.

In the subsequent four chapters, Steve dives into the critical topic of how to optimize the performance of JavaScript-heavy pages through better script content and organization — specifically, how and when to split up large scripts into smaller ones, how to load scripts without blocking one another or breaking dependencies within the code, and how to best in-line scripts, when called for. Each of the four chapters follows an effective methodology: The first author delineates a particular performance mistake made by even some of the most popular websites, with the statistics to back it up. He presents one or more solutions, including any relevant tools, again with waterfall charts illustrating how well the solutions work. Lastly, he explains any browser-specific issues, oftentimes with a handy chart showing which possible method would likely be optimal for the reader's given situation, such as expected browser choices in the site's target audience. When there are potential pitfalls, Steve points them out, with helpful workarounds. He generally provides enough example source code to allow any experienced developer to implement the proposed solutions. Unfortunately, the example code does not appear to be available for download from O'Reilly's website.

The discussion of JavaScript optimization is capped off by the seventh chapter, written by Nicholas C. Zakas, who explains variable scope within JavaScript code, the advantages of choosing local variables as much as possible, scope chain augmentation, the performance ramifications of the four major data types (literal values, variables, arrays, and objects), optimizing flow control statements, and string concatenation. He outlines what sorts of problems can cause the user's Web browser to freeze up, and the differing responses she would see depending upon her chosen browser. Nicholas concludes his chapter by explaining how to utilize timer code to force long-running scripts to yield, in order to avoid these problems. By the way, in Figures 7-2 and 7-3, the data point symbols need to be enlarged so as to be distinguishable; as it is, they are quite difficult to read. More importantly, on page 93, the sentence beginning "This makes array lookup ideal..." is either misworded or mistaken, since array lookup cannot be used for testing inclusion in ranges.

With the eighth chapter, the book shifts gears to focus on network considerations — namely, how to improve the site visitor's experience by optimizing the number of bytes that must be pushed down the wire. In "Scaling with Comet," Dylan Schiemann introduces an emerging set of techniques that Steve Souders describes as "an architecture that goes beyond Ajax to provide high-volume, low-latency communication for real-time applications such as chat and document collaboration" — specifically, by reducing the server-side resources per connection. In Chapter 9, Tony Gentilcore discusses a rather involved problem with using gzip compression — one that negatively impacts at least 15% of Internet users. Even though videos, podcasts, and other audiovisual files consume a lot of the Internet's bandwidth, images are still far more common on websites, and this alone is reason enough for Chapter 10, in which Stoyan Stefanov and Nicole Sullivan explain how to reduce the size of image files without degrading visible quality. They compare the most popular image formats, and also explain alpha transparency and the use of sprites. The only clear improvement that could be made to their presentation is on page 157, where the phrase "named /favicon.ico that sits in the web root" should instead read something like "usually named favicon.ico," since a favicon can have any filename, and can be located anywhere in a site's directory structure.

The lead author returns in Chapter 11, in which he explains how to best divide resources among multiple domains (termed "sharding"). In the subsequent chapter, "Flushing the Document Early," Steve explores the approach of utilizing chunked encoding in order to begin rendering the Web page before its full contents have been downloaded to the browser. The third and final section of the book, devoted to Web browser performance, consists of two chapters, both of whose titles neatly summarize their contents: "Using Iframes Sparingly" and "Simplifying CSS Selectors." That last chapter contains some performance tips that even some of the most experienced CSS wizards may have never heard of before. As with most of the earlier chapters, the narrative tends to be stronger than the illustrations. For instance, Figure 14-5, a multiline chart, is quite misleading, because it appears to depict three values varying over time, when actually each of the ten x-axis coordinates represents a separate major website. A bar chart would obviously have been a much better choice.

Like any first edition of a technical book, this one contains a number of errata (aside from those mentioned earlier): In Figure 1-1, "iteration" is misspelled. On page 23, in the sentence beginning "Thus, if...," the term "was" should instead read "were." In Figures 7-1 and 7-4, the "Global object" box should not contain "num2." On page 95, in the phrase "the terminal condition evaluates to true," that instead should read "false." On page 147, in the sentence beginning "However, the same icon...," the "was" should instead read "were." On page 214, "Web-Pagetest. AOL" should instead read "Web-Pagetest, then AOL," because the first sentence is one long absolute phrase (i.e., lacking a finite noun and verb).

All of these defects can be easily corrected in future printings. What will probably need to wait for a second edition, are improvements to the figures that are in need of replacement or clarification. What the publisher can rectify immediately — should the author and O'Reilly choose to do so — would be to make all of the example source code available for download.

Even though this book is decidedly longer than High Performance Web Sites, and has many more contributing authors, it does not appear to contain as much actionable information as his predecessor — at least for small- to medium-sized websites, which probably make up the majority of all sites on the Web. Even though such methodologies as Comet, Doloto, and Web Workers appear impressive, one has to wonder just how many real-world websites can justify the development and maintenance costs of implementing them, and whether their overhead could easily outweigh any possible benefits. Naturally, these are the sorts of questions that are best answered through equally hard-nosed experimentation — as exemplified by Steve Souders's admirable emphasis upon proving what techniques really work.

Fortunately, none of this detracts from the application development and optimization knowledge presented in the book. With its no-nonsense analysis of Internet performance hurdles, and balanced recommendations of the most promising solutions, Even Faster Web Sites truly delivers on its title's promise to help Web developers wring even more speed out of their websites.

Michael J. Ross is a freelance Web developer and writer.

You can purchase Even Faster Web Sites from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews — to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Michael J. Ross writes "Content management systems (CMSs) are created largely by Web developers using back-end programming languages (such as PHP, by far the most common choice). The free CMSs are built as open source projects, by volunteers who have many demands on their time. As a result of both of these competing factors, far less time is devoted to the front-end aspects of these CMSs. In turn, the "themes" that define the appearance of a CMS-based website are typically substandard, in the eyes of many Web designers and, most likely, countless users of those sites. This criticism has been leveled even against Drupal, although the situation is improving. A new book, Front End Drupal: Designing, Theming, Scripting, is intended to help Drupal designers everywhere speed up that process of improvement." Read on for the rest of Michael's review. Front End Drupal: Designing, Theming, Scripting author Emma Jane Hogbin and Konstantin Kafer pages 456 publisher Prentice Hall rating 8/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN 978-0137136698 summary A comprehensive guide to creating Drupal themes. The book was written by Emma Jane Hogbin and Konstantin Käfer, and published by Prentice Hall on 15 April 2009, under the ISBN 978-0137136698. As suggested by its title, Front End Drupal "is designed to help both experienced designers and rank novices get an understanding of how Drupal theming works," to quote from the book's foreword, written by Dries Buytaert, Drupal's founder and project lead. He notes that creating a Drupal theme requires knowledge of "XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP, all within the context of Drupal." These are some of the key technologies addressed in the book's eleven chapters, and it assumes that the reader is at least familiar with all four of them. The first of the two appendices explains: how to install Drupal and contributed modules on the three different platforms supported (Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X); basic configuration and administration; and installation troubleshooting tips. The second appendix comprises some of the more important example code used in the book, and brief overviews thereof. At the end of the book's 456 pages, there is a coupon code for a 45-day free subscription to read the online edition in the Safari Books Online library

All of the sample source code and themes can be downloaded from the authors' book website. The site also has the author biographies, as well as reported errata, of which there are two, as of this writing. What is most striking about the site is its styling — or lack thereof. One would think that the authors of a book on Drupal theming would have put a commensurate amount of effort into crafting an attractive custom theme for their own website — one that demonstrates their own theming skills and, more importantly to the reader, what is possible using the principles taught in the book. Remarkably, the authors appear to have done nothing more than take the Drupal 6 default theme, Garland, and change the color scheme from shades of blue to shades of brown (matching the book cover); only the blue Drupal icon is unchanged, and its color clashes with the rest of the site.

Prentice Hall makes available their own Web page for the book, where visitors will find a description, two Amazon.com reviews, the table of contents, and a sample chapter ("The Drupal Page") as a PDF file. The entire book is also available in electronic form.

In the book's preface, the authors briefly summarize the chapters and appendices, and define the target audience and technologies with which the reader should be knowledgeable (noted above). Readers should also be familiar with how Drupal works, have some experience administering a Drupal site, and ideally possess some knowledge of website design and development; but that last one is not a hard requirement, since the authors promise to explain the basic concepts as needed.

Any reader who begins the book by skimming the table of contents or the preface's summary of Chapter 1, may be tempted to skip that chapter, especially since it discusses team workflow — something freelancers generally ignore, and employees leave to management. Yet the earlier material is worth reading, if only that it begins to establish a baseline of terminology used throughout the rest of the book. It also provides some basic information on content structure, layout, and naming on a Drupal page. For illustrating the ideas under discussion, the authors use a number of existing websites. In fact, too many different sites: Readers probably would have found it more useful for each idea to be presented in the context of a single neutral subject area, and without distractions such as toilet birthdays (no kidding). Even better, the ideas could have been illustrated through example pages — each page illustrating one or several ideas — built from the ground up. By focusing on pages that a reader could quickly create on his own, the authors could have eliminated the screenshots of those various websites. One example is Figure 1.1, which combines two images, with the topmost one largely obscuring the one below. Most of the topics are covered at a very high level — possibly higher in some cases than readers will find valuable. Nonetheless, there is much solid advice, including some recommended theme resources later in the chapter. In the earlier section on "Topical Organization," there is a brief but excellent discussion on the relative merits of limited versus unlimited tag vocabularies.

The second chapter continues to lay the groundwork, by introducing basic Drupal theme strategies and terminology, three major modules that veteran Drupal developers use frequently (CCK, Views, and Devel), and some valuable browser-based development tools. The definitions of Drupal terms are useful — especially for newbies confused by the Drupal handbooks. One exception is the authors' alternative metaphor for "weight," which proves more confusing than the original. Readers then begin learning how to use the aforesaid modules and tools. However, several of the authors' statements are misleading: On page 43, they are instructed to install the CCK module, and then given a list of additional modules needed; the first one on the list is... CCK. On the next page, the authors state that the FileField module requires the Token module, but it apparently does not. On the page after that, the "manage fields" link is given as the "add field" link. Those last two discrepancies suggest that the book is based on outdated versions of Drupal and/or the contributed modules under discussion, even though its publication date is just a few weeks prior to this writing. Any version differences are likely impossible to confirm, since the authors fail to mention which versions they are using, or provide any guidance to the reader as to which versions to use — unusual for a programming book. At the beginning of the chapter, the reader is told he "will learn step-by-step how to create a mini portfolio Web site," but the process peters out not long after a new content type is created, and the reader finishes the chapter with no such portfolio site.

Chapters 3 and 4 move the reader one step closer toward the ultimate goal of being able to create a new theme with confidence. The first one explains how to find, install, and configure prebuilt themes — also, how to create a very basic theme from scratch, and a subtheme using the Zen starter theme. This material comprises a generally thorough introduction to the topics, compared to most documentation, with plenty of step-by-step explanation. An exception is the Zen section, in which the reader is instructed to place the directory into the themes folder; but it is not made clear whether this is the primary Drupal themes folder, or sites/all/themes (as advised several pages earlier). Secondly, in step 3, readers can only guess as to what is meant by "the main CSS file," as there are several. On the next page, the authors mention "configure" links next to the Zen and Zen Classic themes, but no such links exist for those starter themes. The fourth chapter discusses page template files, site-wide variables, menus and navigation, regions and blocks, search results, templating different sections of a site, aliased URLs, taxonomy templates, and styling for output to printers, PDF files, and mobile devices.

The fifth chapter explores the details of how to modify existing node templates, or create new ones, for all content types. This is what makes it possible to develop highly customized page content, including summaries, embedded images, image galleries, and content based upon output from the Views module. The subsequent chapter focuses on one of the most problematic types of content — forms — and how they can be created using the CCK. The authors recommend TinyMCE as one's WYSIWYG editor module, but that has apparently been replaced by the Wysiwyg API. User editing of content is a key element in building an online community using a Drupal-based site, and it is the topic of Chapter 7, which discusses user profiles, permissions, access, comments, blogs, forums, wikis, spam, CAPTCHAs, and how to make content private for members only. The next chapter addresses the theming of the administrative interface, which the typical site user will never see, but can have a significant impact upon the productivity of the developers and maintainers of a site. Readers learn about RootCandy (a refreshingly different admin theme), and how to theme error pages.

The final three chapters focus on JavaScript and jQuery. Consequently, they compose a stand-alone resource of their own, and could even have been used as the basis for a separate book. Chapter 9 provides an overview of the language, while the other two chapters cover jQuery and how it can be used as part of a Drupal-based site.

Scattered throughout the manuscript are tips, each indicated with a pencil tip icon. These help to break up the text visually, and provide valuable guidance. The contrast between the black text and the dark gray background could certainly be improved; but most of the tips are fairly short, so this does not pose a major problem.

Every chapter ends with a summary, and not a single one of them is useful or needed. Any unique information conveyed in them should have been merged with the introductory paragraphs for the respective chapters, which is where readers would be looking anyway to see what each chapter addresses.

The book has numerous minor problems, including grammatical and stylistic errors, such as dashes incorrectly performing the duty of semicolons, some URLs missing the root directory slash, and excessive use of exclamation marks (more than a dozen before even reaching the second chapter). When stating the sequence of menu items to choose in order to reach a particular admin page, the authors should use ">" or ">>" to separate the menu choices, as is done in most computer books. Instead, the authors opted to use commas, which of course turns every sequential menu path into a list of menu items, which is nonstandard and disconcerting. As is typical in a first edition, the book contains several errata: "Partnership" in Figure 1.7 (page 10), "the GiMP" (page 14; should simply read "GIMP"; after all, this isn't Pulp Fiction), "only focus only" (page 26), "Modification / Date" in Figure 2.1 (page 37; should read "Modification date"), "Content Creation Kit" (throughout the book; should read "Content Construction Kit"), "of [the] view" (page 56), "http:jigsaw" (page 66), "INSTALL [is] present" (page 79), "of [a] page" (page 100), and "to to" (page 125) — in the first quarter of the book alone.

A lingering disappointment is that some of the promised examples are not finished in the narrative, such as the portfolio site mentioned earlier. Secondly, the downloadable source code is incomplete, apparently missing the example code in the first few chapters, such as the Bolg theme files. Furthermore, the downloadable code is not organized by chapter, making it difficult to even determine what example code is missing.

On the other hand, the book has much to offer. For the most part, the explanations and step-by-step instructions are clear, and the diagrams and screenshots are all neatly presented and helpful — though some sections of the book could have benefited from more such figures. With its extensive coverage of all the key technologies, and its wealth of valuable tips, Front End Drupal is an essential resource for learning how to create Drupal themes, and fills a long-standing gap in the Drupal literature, better than any other book currently available.

Michael J. Ross is a freelance Web developer and writer.

You can purchase Front End Drupal: Designing, Theming, Scripting from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

WikiTiki writes "Safari Books Online has a new interview with Barry Libert, one of the authors of 'We are Smarter Than Me: How to Unleash the Power of Crowds in Your Business.' Barry and his coauthors decided to create a wiki and invite the community to help build this book which aims to give advice on using social networking tools like blogs and wikis to businesses. Barry has some interesting comments about both the challenges and payoffs in using social networking tools to create a book about social networking tools."

An anonymous reader writes "Safari Books Online has just posted an interview with Andy Oram and Greg Wilson, the two editors who put together the recent O'Reilly book, Beautiful Code. "Beautiful Code" features 33 different case studies about challenging coding scenarios from some of today's most high-profile developers and OS project leaders. There's also a new Beautiful Code web site based on the book where many of the authors are blogging about their work and coding practices."