Book's Author on Safari, IE Extensions, Etc
on
Core CSS (2nd ed.)
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Woo hoo - I've been Slashdotted. And with a decent review!;-) Fourth book lucky I suppose...
Okay, some explanations are in order for some of the questions I've run across:
Why Safari isn't covered: Safari was only available as a pretty buggy pre-release version while I was writing the book, and it only became 1.0 during printing (figures). I didn't think it worthwhile to include information on this browser until it became more stable, especially since it was obvious that many of its CSS-related bugs were being worked out in successive beta releases. Instead I've covered that info in the Web site, which also includes info on more recent versions of Konqueror and OmniWeb to which it is related through a common rendering engine.
Somebody mentioned that dealing with IE extensions was daft, and shouldn't be taken seriously. I decided to add them into this edition of the book in order to be thorough, and because somebody on Amazon had complained about the lack of any such listing in the first edition. The commentator is probably thinking about the various transition and filter effects thrown into the early editions of IE, which for the most part are about as useful as the beloved tag (they *are* covered however, at the end of the book). Far more interesting are the CSS extensions that have been added primarily for internationalization/localization issues. The CSS extensions Microsoft has added for dealing with things like Ruby layout for the Chinese-Japanese-Korean languages definitely should be taken seriously, as they are genuinely useful. What's more, many of MS' CSS extensions in this area have led the way towards what has become (or will likely become) the official standard. MS does get a basting for seriously jumping the gun on the W3C process, but if you want to starting working now on some CSS3-related code, there's plenty of IE extensions that lead the way that you can play with now.
And my apologies to those who have run into the database errors on the book's supporting Web site -- this is now fixed. Turns out my ISP had changed servers on me, which was the original cause of the problem.
It's obvious from the majority of the comments that most of the people commenting on this have never actually to use FrameMaker for anything.
If you are a Tech Writer or working in desktop publishing firm (the type that issues books rather than newsletters) in any serious capacity, chances are good that you've at least run across Frame, and if you are like me, use it pretty much on a daily basis.
I started using the Unix version first, prior to it being bought out by Adobe, sometime in the mid-90s. I've written books for a book publisher that ultimately *had* to be in Frame format, and many tech writers I know use it. So the fact that it has less than 1% market penetration isn't surprising -- it's always been a niche product.
What I don't find surprising is the fact that Adobe is dropping support for the Mac platform. I came back to Frame 7 recently and was surprised to see how little had been changed since the last time I used it extensively back in the late-90s. While Adobe *has* made some improvements to the product (primarily to just barely keep it usable in the Internet age), but it still has one of the worst UIs going for a commercial product. Embarrasing-looking 8-bit graphical buttons that make the product look cheap, multiple dialogs needed for handling a single task (such as table formatting), and the fact that pretty much anything of use besides basic text formatting is lumped into a single "Special" drop-down menu. And you have to love the dialogs whose windows you can resize without actually resizing the window's contents, which smacks of poor QA. There isn't a day that goes by that I don't curse Adobe for making the barest UI improvements to their product. So to me the announcement about dropping the Mac platform says that Adobe is continuing to neglect this product.
What it does it does well, but increasingly the headaches of the poor UI and the fact that you have to get plug-ins to do what ought to be built-in functions (decent indexing comes to mind; I can buy a good product from IxGen but why has it never been built into Frame?) leads to more frustrations that is necessary for a product that commands a premium price (currenly $799).
I am in a position to make recommendations on software purchases, and unless Adobe becomes serious about its upgrade to Frame (the 7.1 "upgrade" for $199 was laughable) I wouldn't recommend we continue with this product. Give me something that works cleanly in XML, indexes well, with tie-ins to a database structure, that produces decent HTML output and handles markers, variables and all of the "special" functions that Frame builds in and I'll sign up for it in a jiffy.
Book Doesn't Make Compelling Case for LearningUnix
on
Learning UNIX for Mac OS X
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I remember being really interested in this title when I first heard of it -- most of the Mac OS X books I've looked at don't really take a good hard look at the BSD Unix heart of the OS.
I ended up reviewing this book for The Computer Paper, and my editor summed it up with the title: "Unix book doesn't explain why Mac users should learn it".
Okay, I know it is aimed at the beginner, but aside from teaching the basics, none of it really goes into learning any of this would be useful to the reader. Why teach someone about using the lynx browser for example, and not show them how to use grep for finding files, or the basics of shell programming to automate common tasks.
Best book of its type that I've seen so far on this specific topic is Mac OS X Unleashed. For the beginner, I'd recommend Mac OS X: The Missing Manual which probably has about as much info on the Unix end of things while having plenty of good general useful info on OS X.
Wait a sec, this argument might hold water when it comes to visible light astronomy, but for the most part, the Earth's atmosphere is transparent to much of the radio spectrum, (see: this page" for a brief explanation of this fact). So for the most part the Earth's atmosphere isn't as much of a problem for radio astronomy as it is for visible-light astronomy a la Hubble.
Since radio astronomy on the whole requires larger telescopes than their optical counterparts (radio waves being that much larger than those of visible light) getting an equivalent project in orbit -- or on the far side of the moon -- would be that much more prohibitively expensive to build and lift into orbit.
The only real advantage of placing radio telescopes on the moon would be a relative lack of interference with earthly radio signals.
I don't doubt that space-based astronomy is ultimately the way to go, but don't count out the significant advances ground-based telescopes have made in recent years.
Slashdot Mirror
Woo hoo - I've been Slashdotted. And with a decent review! ;-) Fourth book lucky I suppose...
Okay, some explanations are in order for some of the questions I've run across:
Why Safari isn't covered: Safari was only available as a pretty buggy pre-release version while I was writing the book, and it only became 1.0 during printing (figures). I didn't think it worthwhile to include information on this browser until it became more stable, especially since it was obvious that many of its CSS-related bugs were being worked out in successive beta releases. Instead I've covered that info in the Web site, which also includes info on more recent versions of Konqueror and OmniWeb to which it is related through a common rendering engine.
Somebody mentioned that dealing with IE extensions was daft, and shouldn't be taken seriously. I decided to add them into this edition of the book in order to be thorough, and because somebody on Amazon had complained about the lack of any such listing in the first edition. The commentator is probably thinking about the various transition and filter effects thrown into the early editions of IE, which for the most part are about as useful as the beloved tag (they *are* covered however, at the end of the book). Far more interesting are the CSS extensions that have been added primarily for internationalization/localization issues. The CSS extensions Microsoft has added for dealing with things like Ruby layout for the Chinese-Japanese-Korean languages definitely should be taken seriously, as they are genuinely useful. What's more, many of MS' CSS extensions in this area have led the way towards what has become (or will likely become) the official standard. MS does get a basting for seriously jumping the gun on the W3C process, but if you want to starting working now on some CSS3-related code, there's plenty of IE extensions that lead the way that you can play with now.
And my apologies to those who have run into the database errors on the book's supporting Web site -- this is now fixed. Turns out my ISP had changed servers on me, which was the original cause of the problem.
It's obvious from the majority of the comments that most of the people commenting on this have never actually to use FrameMaker for anything.
If you are a Tech Writer or working in desktop publishing firm (the type that issues books rather than newsletters) in any serious capacity, chances are good that you've at least run across Frame, and if you are like me, use it pretty much on a daily basis.
I started using the Unix version first, prior to it being bought out by Adobe, sometime in the mid-90s. I've written books for a book publisher that ultimately *had* to be in Frame format, and many tech writers I know use it. So the fact that it has less than 1% market penetration isn't surprising -- it's always been a niche product.
What I don't find surprising is the fact that Adobe is dropping support for the Mac platform. I came back to Frame 7 recently and was surprised to see how little had been changed since the last time I used it extensively back in the late-90s. While Adobe *has* made some improvements to the product (primarily to just barely keep it usable in the Internet age), but it still has one of the worst UIs going for a commercial product. Embarrasing-looking 8-bit graphical buttons that make the product look cheap, multiple dialogs needed for handling a single task (such as table formatting), and the fact that pretty much anything of use besides basic text formatting is lumped into a single "Special" drop-down menu. And you have to love the dialogs whose windows you can resize without actually resizing the window's contents, which smacks of poor QA. There isn't a day that goes by that I don't curse Adobe for making the barest UI improvements to their product. So to me the announcement about dropping the Mac platform says that Adobe is continuing to neglect this product.
What it does it does well, but increasingly the headaches of the poor UI and the fact that you have to get plug-ins to do what ought to be built-in functions (decent indexing comes to mind; I can buy a good product from IxGen but why has it never been built into Frame?) leads to more frustrations that is necessary for a product that commands a premium price (currenly $799).
I am in a position to make recommendations on software purchases, and unless Adobe becomes serious about its upgrade to Frame (the 7.1 "upgrade" for $199 was laughable) I wouldn't recommend we continue with this product. Give me something that works cleanly in XML, indexes well, with tie-ins to a database structure, that produces decent HTML output and handles markers, variables and all of the "special" functions that Frame builds in and I'll sign up for it in a jiffy.
I ended up reviewing this book for The Computer Paper, and my editor summed it up with the title: "Unix book doesn't explain why Mac users should learn it".
Okay, I know it is aimed at the beginner, but aside from teaching the basics, none of it really goes into learning any of this would be useful to the reader. Why teach someone about using the lynx browser for example, and not show them how to use grep for finding files, or the basics of shell programming to automate common tasks.
Best book of its type that I've seen so far on this specific topic is Mac OS X Unleashed. For the beginner, I'd recommend Mac OS X: The Missing Manual which probably has about as much info on the Unix end of things while having plenty of good general useful info on OS X.
Since radio astronomy on the whole requires larger telescopes than their optical counterparts (radio waves being that much larger than those of visible light) getting an equivalent project in orbit -- or on the far side of the moon -- would be that much more prohibitively expensive to build and lift into orbit.
The only real advantage of placing radio telescopes on the moon would be a relative lack of interference with earthly radio signals.
I don't doubt that space-based astronomy is ultimately the way to go, but don't count out the significant advances ground-based telescopes have made in recent years.
8-{)}