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The Web Programming CD Bookshelf
The Good The Web Programming CD Bookshelf (WPCB) consists of a CD and a paper copy of Webmaster in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition. The CD contains an HTML version of that, as well as Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference, 2nd Edition, Programming PHP, PHP Cookbook, JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, 4th Edition and Web Database Applications with PHP & MySQL. There is an excellent combined index of the six volumes and a nice Java search engine, QuestAgent Pro version 4.0.9. from JObjects. According to the documentation for the engine on the CD, "It has problems running with Mozilla 0.9 and 1.0 and Netscape 7 on Mac OS 9, and occasionally on Linux"; I had no problems running it on Mac OS X in Mozilla 1.3, Safari or Internet Explorer apart from a small visual problem with another tab in Mozilla (separate windows was fine, only another tab in the same window caused a problem).
All the contents pages and indices of the volumes are of course hyperlinked. Once you are on the pages of a 'book' the top of each page has a link to the contents page, next page, previous page and the search form. The bottom of each page has next and previous buttons (with the relevant page titles), a link to the books contents page and index and below them all a row of links to the Bookshelf home and each of the books. Taken together this makes moving through the books and finding the information you want easy, for the most part.
Once you start using the collection there are some great benefits. The ability to just cut and paste the example code right out of the text you are reading cannot be underestimated.
The books themselves are the quality you expect from O'Reilly - well-written, well-edited and containing the information you need on a given subject. The one you get on paper, Webmaster in a Nutshell is a good overview of HTML, CSS, XML, JavaScript, CGI and Perl, PHP and Apache that I find a good desktop reference. The others provide a good depth and perspective on their respective subjects.
The Bad
Obviously a great deal of the work of converting the books to HTML must be done by automated software, and sometimes you wish a little more had hand-work had been done. For example, Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference has an alphabetical list of all HTML and XHTML tags and their attributes -- as one page of 23,000 lines of HTML. The only way into this mammoth list is via the book index, there is no quick list of tags with links on a separate page or other fast way.
My other complaint about that content is that the selection of books is PHP heavy. If you are involved in using PHP to build websites this volume would be a great help; others may feel they would have been better served by a collection that dropped at least one of the PHP books in favour of, perhaps, The Perl Cookbook. Webmaster in a Nutshell is not as useful in this collection as you might think, some of what it contains is covered by other volumes in the set. That's not to say that it isn't an excellent book and a good choice as the one that comes in paper with the CD, just that once again I'm not sure it really needed to be in the collection.
That brings me to my final complaint, cost. Sure, 6 books for $130 U.S. seems like a bargain, but unless you are interested in all 6 books (which means principally developing for the web in PHP) it starts to be less of a bargain. If you think of it as more expensive than a six-month subscription to O'Reilly's online book service, Safari (which allows you ten books, changeable when you want) then this is less than a bargain.
Conclusion
If you are developing for PHP then this might be a good resource at a fair price; you'll find it almost indispensable and (unlike Safari) you can use it when you're offline. If you develop in some other environment, it is an overpriced way of getting a few books as electronic text. If you develop for the web in Perl, then have a serious look at The Perl CD Bookshelf instead, or perhaps consider a Safari subscription.
You can purchase The Web Programming CD Bookshelf from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
I like PHP as much as the next person, but I do think it a bit unwise for so many Web services, Web coding and database/SSL books to rely on PHP. There's no major flaws with the language, per se, but I think that it would be better if there were more diversity amongst these books, particularly as PHP development moves so quickly that a few of them are even out of date by the time they are published. What's wrong with a little Python now and then?
Bash script for FP whores
I put a web bookshelf similar to this up on a (password protected, of course) page on my site. This is extremely handy when I'm helping some friend set up a php page, or from work. Very handy to have several books just a web browser away.
How did this get modded up to 4 when the poster just cut and paste out of the article? What a waste of modpoints.
Nice job proving nobody reads the article, though. ;)
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
I wonder if moderators actually read these comments and/or the article before alotting points to them.. he wrote "Huh, funny to see this here...I flipped through the book at B&N the other day." and then cut & pasted the rest of it from the article and got +4 interesting? weak...
Safari books may work well in Safari, but it doesn't work well on Any Browser(tm). At least when I received a Safari subscription as a winter holidays gift (a very thoughtful gift!), I couldn't use the site because a) it didn't work correctly with Mozilla due to javascript and frame/iframe differences, and more important b) it didn't work correctly on systems with larger fonts than Windows "small" -- the borders would overwrite or obscure text, and indexes were overlaying that again. Completely unreadable. As there was no way I was going to change to "small" fonts on a 1920x1440 display, it was a product I couldn't even use.
Furthermore, I had to argue back and forth with O'Reilly to get a refund to the giver, even though I hadn't added any books to the bookshelf, cause I couldn't. They wanted to charge for the first month no matter what.
It's obvious that whoever designed the O'Reilly Safari Bookshelf never read any of the excellent O'Reilly books on Web Design and/or usability.
Regards,
--
*Art
Another O'Reilly title that might arguably have been suitable for inclusion, but that wasn't, is the one I wrote, Perl for Web Site Management.
Sigh. If a web programming book gets written in a forest, and no one actually reads it, did it really get written?
Actually, I did write part of chapter eight sitting under some trees during a hike in the Inyo National Forest. That was fun, at least.