The Modern Web: Multi-Device Web Development with HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript – #bookreview

The Modern Web
Multi-Device Web Development with HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript
Peter Gasston
(No Starch Press – Kindle, paperback)

After a quick first glance, you might look right past this book. You might assume its title, “The Modern Web,” simply introduces some kind of heavily footnoted, academic study of the Internet.

Not so, Web breath. In this case, it’s the subtitle that should grab your attention.

Whether you hope to go into web development, or you’re already there, Peter Gasston’s new book can help you get an improved grasp on three important, device-agnostic tools that will be essential to your work and career development. They are: HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript, that not-so-simple programming language that many new web specialists often try to avoid learning. (That’s because, typically, it’s easier, more fun and a bit less cryptic to work with HTML5 and CSS3.)

Also, Gasston notes, there have been big explosions in the number of libraries and frameworks that use JavaScript, further clouding a developer’s ability to know which ones he or she should learn next. (The author limits his coverage to four: jQuery, YepNope, Modernizr, and Mustache.)

Gasston’s well-written book zeroes in on the three “web technologies that can be used anywhere, from open websites to device-specific web apps.” And on all sorts of devices, ranging from tiny phones to tablet computers to wall-covering HDTVs.

And his teaching aim is to show you “modern coding methods and techniques that you can use to build websites across multiple devices or that are tailored to the single device class you’re targeting.”

By the way, “websites” is simply a shorthand term the author uses “to avoid repetition. The features you’ll learn from this book are relevant to websites, web applications, [and] packaged HTML hybrid applications–in short, anything that can use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.”

Gasston also wants you to learn that “fast” is the main thing that matters to those who will use your site. “Your site needs to be fast–and feel fast–regardless of the device it’s being displayed on,” he emphasizes. “And fast means not only technical performance (which is incredibly important) but also the responsiveness of the interface and how easily users can navigate the site and find what they need to complete the task that brought them to you in the first place.”

His 243-page book contains many short, useful code examples and illustrations, and is excellent for developers who have at least a little bit of experience with HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript but aren’t sure where and how to focus their energies and attention for the rapidly changing career road ahead.

The Modern Web offers a well-organized introduction, plus 11 chapters:

1. The Web Platform
2. Structure and Semantics
3. Device Responsive CSS
4. New Approaches to CSS Layouts
5. Modern JavaScript
6. Device APIs
7. Images and Graphics
8. New Forms
9. Multimedia
10. Web Apps
11. The Future

There also are two appendices: Browser Support as of March 2013 and Further Reading.

Peter Gasston has been a web developer for more than 12 years, and his previous book is The Book of CSS3.

He notes that “[t]he Web is constantly evolving, and book publishing means taking just a single snapshot of a moment. Some things will change; some will wither and be removed. I’ve tried to mitigate this by covering only technologies that are based on open standards rather than vendor-specific ones and that already have some level of implementation in browsers.”

He urges developers to stay alert to changing Web standards and to “be curious, be playful, keep on top of it all. He stresses: “There’s never been a more exciting time to work in web development, but you’ll need to put in an extra shift to really take advantage of it.”

– Si Dunn

Getting Started with Mule Cloud Connect – To help sort out the chaos of Internet services – #bookreview

Getting Started with Mule Cloud Connect
Ryan Carter
(O’Reilly – paperback, Kindle)

In a digital world increasingly cluttered with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platforms, Open APIs, and social networks, complexity quickly can get out of hand.

“It all starts,” Ryan Carter writes in his new book, “with a simple API that publishes somebody’s status to Facebook, sends a Tweet, or updates a contact in Salesforce. As you start to integrate more and more of these external services with your applications, trying to identify the tasks that one might want to perform when you’re surrounded by SOAP, REST, JSON, XML, GETs, PUTs, POSTs, and DELETEs, can be a real challenge.”

Indeed. But never fear, Mule ESB can ride to your rescue and connect you quickly and easily to the cloud. At least, that’s the marketing claim.

Some truly big-name users, it should be noted, are adding credibility to Mule’s claimed capabilities and usefulness as an Open Source integration platform. They include Adobe, eBay, Hewlett-Packard, J.P. Morgan, T-Mobile, Ericsson, Southwest Airlines, and Nestle, to mention just a few.

Meanwhile, riding Mule to the cloud is the central focus of this compact (105 pages), well-written get-started guide. Its author, Ryan Carter, is both a specialist in integration and APIs and “an appointed Mule champion” who contributes regularly to the MuleSoft community.

“Mule,” Carter points out, “is an integration platform that allows developers to connect applications together quickly and easily, enabling them to exchange data regardless of the different technologies that the applications use. It is also at the core of CloudHub, an Integration Platform as a Service(IPaas). CloudHub allows you to integrate cross-cloud services, create new APIs on top of existing data sources, and integrate on-premise applications with cloud services.”

The book is structured so you start off by building a simple Mule application that will serve “as the base of our examples and introduce some core concepts for those unfamiliar with Mule.” Then Carter shows and illustrates how to “start taking advantage of Mule Cloud Connectors.” He includes numerous code examples, plus some screenshots and diagrams.

The book’s six chapters are:

1. Getting Started
2. Cloud Connectors
3. OAuth Connectivity
4. Configuration Management
5. Real-Time Connectivity
6. Custom Connectivity

Carter emphasizes: “Mule Cloud Connect offers a more maintainable way to work with APIs. Built on top of the Mule and CloudHub integration platforms, Cloud Connectors are service-specific clients that abstract away the complexities of transports and protocols. Many complex but common processes such as authorization and session management work without you having to write a single line of code. Although service-specific, Cloud Connectors all share a common and consistent interface to configure typical API tasks such as OAuth, WebHooks, and connection management. They remove the pain from working with multiple, individual client libraries.”

If Mule does not have a connector for a resource that you need, the book shows you how to create your own.

Getting Started with Mule Cloud Connect can get you started on a beneficial ride of  discovery, and it can take you onto the trail that leads to solutions.

– Si Dunn

JavaScript as Compilation Target: ClojureScript and Dart – #programming #bookreview

Despite its widespread success, JavaScript has a reputation for being a computer language with many flaws. Still, it is now everywhere on the planet, so it is here to stay, very likely for a long, long time.

Not surprisingly, several new languages have emerged that jump over some of JavaScript’s hurdles, offer improved capabilities, and also compile to optimized JavaScript code.

Two of these languages are the focus of noteworthy new “Up and Running” books from O’Reilly: ClojureScript: Up and Running and Dart: Up and Running.

Here are short reviews of each book:

ClojureScript: Up and Running
Stuart Sierra and Luke VanderHart
(O’Reilly, paperback, Kindle)

ClojureScript, the authors contend, “provides developers with a language that is more powerful than JavaScript, which can reach all the same places JavaScript can, with fewer of JavaScript’s shortcomings.”

The primary targets of ClojureScript are “web browser applications, but it is also applicable to any environment where JavaScript is the only programmable technology available,” they add.

“ClojureScript is more than Clojure syntax layered on top of JavaScript: it supports the full semantics of the Clojure language, including immutable data structures, lazy sequences, first-class functions, and macros,” they emphasize.

Their 100-page book focuses on how to use ClojureScript’s features, starting at the “Hello world” level and gradually advancing to “Development Process and Workflow” and “Integrating with Clojure.” (ClojureScript is designed for building client-side applications, but it can be merged with Clojure on the JVM to create client-server applications.)

Early in the book, they also describe how to compile a ClojureScript file to JavaScript and emit code “that is fully compatible with the Advanced Optimizations mode of the Google Closure Compiler.”

The two writers are Clojure/ClojureScript developers with a previous book to their credit.

ClojureScript: Up and Running is written well and appropriately illustrated with code samples, flow charts, and other diagrams. The authors recommend using the Leiningen build system for Clojure, plus the lein-cljsbuild plug-in for ClojureScript.

Their book is a smooth introduction to ClojureScript that requires no prior knowledge of Clojure. But you do need a basic working knowledge of JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and the Document Object Model (DOM).

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Dart: Up and Running
Kathy Walrath and Seth Ladd
(O’Reilly, paperback, Kindle)

Google created Dart to be “an open-source, batteries-included developer platform for building structured HTML5 web apps,” the two authors note.

“Dart provides not only a new language, but libraries, an editor, a virtual machine (VM), a browser that can run Dart apps natively, and a compiler to JavaScript.”

Indeed, Dart looks very similar to JavaScript and is “easy to learn,” the two writers state. “A wide range of developers can learn Dart quickly. It’s an object-oriented language with classes, single inheritance, lexical scope, top-level functions, and a familiar syntax. Most developers are up and running with Dart in just a few hours.”

The authors work at Google and note that some of the software engineers who helped develop the V8 JavaScript engine that is “responsible for much of Chrome’s speed” are now “working on the Dart project.”

Dart has been designed to scale from simple scripts all the way up to complex apps, and it can run on both the client and the server.

Those who choose to code with Dart are urged to download the open-source Dart Editor tool, because it also comes with a “Dart-to-JavaScript compiler and a version of Chromium (nicknamed Dartium) that includes the Dart VM.”

Since Dart is new, the writers also urge readers to keep an eye periodically on the Dart website and on their book’s GitHub site, where code can be downloaded and errors and corrections noted.

Dart: Up and Running is a well-structured, well-written how-to book, nicely fortified with short code examples and other illustrations. While the book appears very approachable and simple, it is not for complete beginners. You should have a basic working knowledge of JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and the Document Object Model (DOM).

If you are looking for a web development language that matches JavaScript’s dynamic nature but also addresses JavaScript’s sometimes-aggravating shortcomings, consider trying Dart—with this book in hand.

– Si Dunn

WordPress: The Missing Manual – Covers what you need to know & can profit from – #bookreview

WordPress: The Missing Manual
Matthew MacDonald
(O’Reilly, paperback – Kindle)

It’s easy to set up and launch a basic WordPress blog. But once you do, it’s also very easy to just keep blogging and ignore the many other options and features that WordPress offers. (I’m guilty of that, which is why I’m happy to see this book.)

If you want to know more about how to use WordPress or how to improve the appearance of an existing blog, WordPress: The Missing Manual definitely should be in your hands.  Matthew MacDonald’s new book is well-written, heavily illustrated, and packed with good how-to steps and tips.

Many small businesses and numerous large companies also use WordPress to provide some or all of their web presence. MacDonald’s 545-page how-guide has essential information for these users, too.

The book is organized into five parts:

• Part One: Starting Out with WordPress – Covers key decisions you should make before starting to use WordPress.
• Part Two: Building a WordPress Blog – The blogging-on-WordPress basics are presented here. But: “Even if you’re planning something more exotic than JAWB (Just Another WordPress Blog, don’t skip this section,” the author urges. “The key skills you’ll learn here also underpin custom sites, like the kind you’ll learn to build in Part Four of the book.”
• Part Three: Supercharging Your Blog – Explains how to use plug-ins to add new features to your self-hosted blog site. Shows “how to put video, music, and photo galleries on any WordPress site. Covers “how to collaborate with a whole group of authors…and how to attract boatloads of web visitors….”
• Part Four: From Blog to Website – Shows how to “take your WordPress skills beyond the blog and learn to craft a custom website” with WordPress at its heart.
• Part Five: Appendices – Appendix A “explains how to take a website you created on a free WordPress.com hosting service and move it to another web host to get more features.” Appendix B, meanwhile, gathers up the “useful web links” scattered throughout the book and puts them into one place organized by chapter. A link also is provided where this collection of links can be downloaded.

How popular is WordPress? It is, according to MacDonald, “ridiculously popular…stunningly popular…responsible for roughly one-sixth of the world’s websites….And one out of every five new sites runs on WordPress….”

If you choose to go the WordPress route, be sure you have WordPress: The Missing Manual with you.

– Si Dunn

Specificity, Selectors, and the Cascade: Applying CSS3 to Documents – #bookreview

Selectors, Specificity, and the Cascade: Applying CSS3 to Documents
Eric A. Meyer
(O’Reilly, paperback – Kindle)

If you know some basic CSS but wonder how the “cascade” part of Cascading Style Sheets works, here is a useful guide.

Actually, this is a 73-page, two-chapter excerpt from the upcoming fourth edition of Eric A. Meyer’s CSS: The Definitive Guide. If you are learning CSS, dealing with CSS issues, or moving to CSS3, this small book can provide you with numerous how-to examples to apply to right now.

The first chapter focuses on “Selectors.” Selectors are not clearly defined at the beginning. But they generally are described elsewhere as “patterns” that can be used to select the element or elements you want to style in a document, such as headings of a certain font sizes or paragraphs with text in specific colors.

Fortunately, the first chapter’s code examples, descriptive paragraphs, and illustrations quickly clarify how to put selectors to work in a document. “[D]ocument structure and CSS selectors allow you to apply a wide variety of style to elements,” the author notes.

The second chapter’s topics are “Specificity and the Cascade.” And the initial technical definitions get a bit dense. For example: “When determining which values should apply to an element, a user agent must consider not only inheritance but also the specificity of the declaration, as well as the origin of the declarations themselves. The process of consideration is what’s known as the cascade.”

Uh, okay.

Once again, fortunately, the second chapter’s code samples, illustrations, and follow-up paragraphs quickly clarify what is going on. And they enable you to learn by doing, seeing the outcome, and applying what you’ve learned to documents of your own.

– Si Dunn

Practical Vim: Edit Text at the Speed of Thought – #programming #bookreview

Practical Vim: Edit Text at the Speed of Thought
Drew Neil
(Pragmatic Bookshelf, paperback)

Vim is a popular, free text editor used by programmers, web developers, and others. If you are a reasonably good touch typist and know just two commands, i and :w, you can create simple code files and text files in a hurry. For serious Vim users, however, there is a fairly long learning curve that includes a large array of features and configurable settings.

Practical Vim: Edit Text at the Speed of Thought is for Vim users who have been through the basic tutorial offered through the program and now want to step up their skills.

The book focuses on “the core functionality of the editor…[m]aster Vim’s core, and you’ll gain portable access to a text editing power tool,” author Drew Neil promises.

Neil has structured his content as “a recipe book. It’s not designed to be read from start to finish.”

Instead, Practical Vim follows its opening chapter, “The Vim Way,” with 20 additional chapters separated into six parts:

• Part 1 – Modes (Normal, Insert, Visual, Command Line)
• Part 2 – Files (Manage Multiple Files, Open Files and Save Them to Disk)
• Part 3 – Getting Around Faster (Navigate Inside Files with Motions, Navigate Between Files with Jumps)
• Part 4 – Registers (Copy and Paste, Macros)
• Part 5 – Patterns (Matching Patterns and Literals, Search, Substitution, Global Commands)
• Part 6 – Tools (Index and Navigate Source Code with ctags; Compile Code and Navigate Errors with the Quickfix List; Search Project-Wide with grep, vimgrep, and Others; Dial X for Autocompletion; Find and Fix Typos with Vim’s Spell Checker; Now What?

There is one appendix, and its focus is: Customize Vim to Suit Your Preferences.

The book is well written, and it provides numerous how-to steps, illustrated sequences of commands, tips, explanations, and suggestions.

If you are a Vim novice and serious about getting good at using the program, Drew Neil’s Practical Vim can show you how to do it.

– Si Dunn

Practical Vim: Edit Text at the Speed of Thought

For more information:  paperback

Learning Node – A good how-to guide for server-side Web development with Node.js – #programming #bookreview

Learning Node
Shelley Powers
(O’Reilly, paperback – Kindle)

 “Node is designed to be used for [server-side] applications that are heavy on input/output (I/O), but light on computation,” veteran Web technology author Shelley Powers notes in Learning Node, her ninth and newest how-to book from O’Reilly.

“Node.js,” she explains, “is a server-side technology that’s based on Google’s V8 JavaScript engine. It’s a highly scalable system that uses asynchronous, event-driven I/O (input/output), rather than threads or separate processes. “It’s ideal for web applications that are frequently accessed but computationally simple.”

I’ve criticized some previous Node books (1) for assuming that all of their readers know a lot about Node.js and assorted programming languages and (2) for not giving enough step-by-step installation and start-up information.

Happily, Learning Node is well written, nicely illustrated with code samples and screen shots, and assumes only that you have some working familiarity with JavaScript. It gives a detailed overview of how to set up development environments in Linux (Ubuntu) and Windows 7. “Installation on a Mac should be similar to installation on Linux,” the author adds.

One caveat regarding code examples: “Most were tested in a Linux environment, but should work, as is, in any Node environment.”

The 374-page book has 16 chapters. The first five “cover both getting Node and the package manager (npm) installed , how to use them, creating your first applications, and utilizing modules.”

Shelley Powers notes that she incorporates “the use of the Express framework, which also utilizes the Connect middleware, throughout the book.” So if you have little or no experience with Express, you will need to pay attention to chapters 6 through 8. But: “After these foundation chapters, you can skip around a bit,” she adds.

Some of the additional chapters cover key/value pairs, using MongoDb with Node, and working with Node’s relational database bindings.

Two chapters get into specialized application use. “Chapter 12 focuses purely on graphics and media access, including how to provide media for the new HTML5 video element, as well as working with PDF documents and Canvas,” the author points out. “Chapter 13 covers the very popular Sockets.io module, especially for working with the new web socket functionality.”

The final chapters are crucial, particularly if you want to move from learning Node to working in a production environment. Chapter 14 covers “Testing and Debugging Node Applications.” Chapter 15 “covers issues of security and authority…it is essential that you spend time in this chapter before you roll a Node application out for general use.”

Meanwhile, Chapter 16 describes “how to prepare your application for production use, including how to deploy your Node application not only on your own system , but also in one of the cloud servers that are popping up to host Node applications.”

Learning Node is both an excellent overall introduction to Node.js and a how-to reference guide that you will want to keep close at hand as you develop and deploy Node applications.

– Si Dunn

For more information: Node.js, paperback, Kindle

Developing with Google+ –A handy how-to guide for working with the Google+ Platform – #programming #bookreview

Developing with Google+
Jennifer Murphy
(O’Reilly/Google Press, paperback – Kindle)

Ready to integrate Google+ with an existing website? Eager to build your own Google+ social application? This well-written and nicely illustrated how-to guide can get you started.

Jennifer Murphy’s new book shows you, step by step, how to become “comfortable digging into Google+” and its application programming interface (API).

“The Google+ platform has three categories of features,” notes the author, who works at Google.

“The three categories of the Google+ platform are social plugins, like the +1 button, RESTful web services, which provide read access to Google+ data, and hangout applications, for writing your own real[-] time collaboration apps. Additionally, the RESTful web services can be used in a couple of ways. You can either access public data directly when you know what you’re looking for, or you can use OAuth2.0 to access your user’s data on Google+.”

The 91-page book is divided into six chapters that follow the progress of a fictional company ( humorously named “Baking Disasters”) as it adds all of the features of the Google+ platform to its website.

The chapters are:

1. Introduction
2. Social Plugins
3. Public Data APIs
4. OAuth-Enabled APIs
5. Collaborative Baking with Hangout Apps
6. Wrapping Up the Baked Goods

Depending on how experienced you are with developing on social platforms, the book is structured so you can easily skip around to the parts that are new to you. Or you can work through the processes one step and one chapter at a time.

– Si Dunn

Get  more information here:  paperback – Kindle

Head First HTML and CSS, 2nd Edition – An effective and entertaining guide now updated for HTML5 – #bookreview

Head First HTML and CSS, 2^nd Edition
Elisabeth Robson and Eric Freeman
(O’Reilly, paperback)

As a techie, I am admittedly a bit mediocre. I do know most of the critical differences between a couch and CouchDB. But I don’t speak fluent JavaScript or Klingon. I seldom eat regular expressions for breakfast. And I never brush my teeth with JSON or even SQLite.

In other words, I have to look up stuff in books, mess around with code examples, and try to puzzle out why I just wrote a function that completely blew up when I called it.

The clearer the how-to instructions and code examples, the better for my time-battered brain.

So, here is no surprise: I love the “Head First” series from O’Reilly. Its books introduce topics in amusing, easy-to-handle bites (and bytes) that are well illustrated and presented in orderly progressions. Typically, you create a simple project and spend the rest of the text learning how to add functions or features to it and improve its appearance and overall usability.

When I am in a mood to play for a few minutes or an hour or so, I enjoy opening a “Head First” volume. I can quickly teach my old-dog-self new tricks by working through a few of the examples and lighthearted explanations.

First published in 2005, Head First HTML and CSS has now been updated to cover HTML5. If you are a newcomer wanting to work with web pages or expand some basic web-page knowledge, Elisabeth Robson’s and Eric Freeman’s new 2^nd edition is an excellent guide. It shows, step by step, how to create standards-based web pages using HTML5 and cascading style sheets (CSS).

Do not be intimidated by the book’s size (723 pages) and heft (nearly four pounds).  It will get you off to a fast start learning basic Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML). Then it introduces each new topic in small steps, with plenty of screenshots, diagrams, notes, tips, exercises, and Q&A sessions to help you stay on track.

Here is how the book is organized:

1. The Language of the Web: getting to know html
2. Meet the “HT” in HTML: going further, with hypertext
3. Web Page Construction: building blocks
4. A Trip to Webville: getting connected
5. Meeting the Media: adding images to your pages
6. Serious HTML: standards and all that jazz
7. Adding a Little Style: getting started with CSS
8. Expanding your Vocabulary: styling with fonts and colors
9. Getting Intimate with Elements: the box model
10. Advanced Web Construction: divs and spans
11. Arranging Elements: layout and positioning
12. Modern HTML: html5 markup
13. Getting Tabular: tables and more lists
14. Getting Interactive: html forms

The authors introduce basic HTML before taking you into HTML5. And they deliberately advocate “a clean separation between the structure of your pages and the presentation of your pages.” They teach you “to use HTML for structure and CSS for style….” They also show you how to test your web pages using more than one browser, so you can learn how to create pages “that work well in a variety of them.”

They do not try to cover everything in their “brain-friendly guide.”  They offer Head First HTML and CSS, 2^nd Edition as “a learning experience, not a reference book.” (The book’s appendix, by the way, is titled “The Top Ten Topics (We Didn’t Cover): leftovers.” It focuses on more things you might want to consider and try.)

Once the authors have tossed you in head first and helped you develop a reasonably good feel for HTML5 and CSS, then you can go look for the fancy stuff.

You will have better notions of what to do with it once you have it.

– Si Dunn

Learning Web Design, 4th Edition – Beginner’s guide updated for HTML5, CSS3 & JavaScript – #bookreview

Learning Web Design, 4th Edition
Jennifer Niederst Robbins
(O’Reilly, paperback)

Eager to learn web design, but not sure where to start and what you will need? Need a steady, guiding hand as you try to figure out how build your first web pages?

This handsome new edition of Learning Web Design can be your how-to, go-to handbook for a long time, whether you are a newbie or already have web experience.

The expanded and updated guidebook now includes coverage of HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. There is also some focus on ensuring web pages display well on mobile device, and on making graphics files smaller for faster loading.

Subtitled “Beginner’s Guide to HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Web Graphics,” Jennifer Niederst Robbins’ book is a complete, well-illustrated course. It can help you get a solid grounding in the fundamentals of web page creation and web design.

The book’s 603 pages are organized into 22 chapters and five parts. The parts are:

1. Getting Started
2. HTML Markup for Structure
3. CSS for Presentation
4. JavaScript for Behaviors
5. Creating Web Graphics

“There are many levels of involvement in web design, from building a small site for yourself  to making it a full-blown career,” the author notes. “You may enjoy being a full-service website developer or just specializing in one skill. There are a lot of ways you can go.”

In general terms, she divides “web design” into “four very broad categories: design, development, content strategy, and multimedia.” On a small website, you may be responsible for understanding and implementing them all. But if you work for a company with a very large website, you may be just one member of a big team that supports and updates or changes its pages. And your job may entail just one limited aspect of web design.

But the more you know and can show that you know, the better your job security and career options may be. Learning Web Design likewise can be an excellent reference handbook for students studying web design in college or high school. And, if you have a solo small business and are reasonably computer savvy, this book can help you put together, post and maintain a good website even if you have never touched HTML.

The author, a long-time veteran of web design, includes numerous tips and references to additional materials. She also ends each chapter with a “Test Yourself” quiz, so you can “see if you picked up the important bits of information.” And don’t worry. The answers to all of the questions are in Appendix A.

– Si Dunn