Programming Firefox
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Book Description
Building Applications in the Browser
Product Description
This is your guide to building Internet applications and user interfaces with the Mozilla component framework, which is best known for the Firefox web browser and Thunderbird email client. Programming Firefox demonstrates how to use the XML User Interface Language (XUL) with open source tools in the framework's Cross-Platform Component (XPCOM) library to develop a variety of projects, such as commercial web applications and Firefox extensions.
This book serves as both a programmer's reference and an in-depth tutorial, so not only do you get a comprehensive look at XUL's capabilities--from simple interface design to complex, multitier applications with real-time operations--but you also learn how to build a complete working application with XUL. If you're coming from a Java or .NET environment, you'll be amazed at how quickly large-scale applications can be constructed with XPCOM and XUL.
Topics in Programming Firefox include:
- An overview of Firefox technology
- An introduction to the graphical elements that compose a XUL application
- Firefox development tools and the process used to design and build applications
- Managing an application with multiple content areas
- Introduction to Resource Description Files, and how the Firefox interface renders RDF
- Manipulating XHTML with JavaScript
- Displaying documents using the Scalable Vector Graphics standard and HTML Canvas
- The XML Binding Language and interface overlays to extend Firefox
- Implementing the next-generation forms interface through XForms
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Amazon.com:
3.4 out of 5 stars (8 customer reviews)
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Not bad but not comprehensive either, 25 Jun 2007
By V. Sinitsyn - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Programming Firefox: Building Rich Internet Applications with XUL (Paperback)
Back in 2005, I've read "Rapid Application Development with Mozilla" by Nigel McFarlane - pretty big and comprehensive (I think) book about Mozilla platform. I'm not a web developer but I always try to keep up with the latest developments in the industry, so I was looking for a book which covers Firefox peculiarities. That was my primary motivation for buying "Programming Firefox" by Kenneth C. Feldt.
The book itself was a bit disappointment: it was not as comprehensive as I expected it to be (honestly, I thought it would be both comprehensive and slim - probably I was just asking for too much). The author employ "learning by doing" approach - in the first half of the book he develops a XUL application and explains things required to build it. Although this approach works really well for the magazines where you are limited in space, when you read a book you expect more general discussion which is applied to the specific subject only at the very latest step. If you are trying to explain everything using only one (or very few) program(s) as a test base you will necessarily limit the discussion to topics relevant to that problem - which is again okay for the magazine but not for the textbook. The most notable omissions from the book in this sense are: whole XPCOM framework (several interfaces and the way to create the components via XPConnect are mentioned briefly but it does not go any further solving problems relevant for the example application); keys, keysets and commands (nothing was said about it), Mozilla-specific CSS attributes (-moz-appearance is mentioned briefly), complicated layouts (deck, stack and the friends). I would also prefer to see brief introduction to JavaScript.
A strong part of the book is that it's not limited to XUL/XBL - SVG, XForms and canvas tag are also mentioned. Unfortunately (and again), only XForms are covered throughly - when it comes to SVG you see small subset of features required to build bar diagram.
As mentioned in the previous review, code is formatted badly (and actually I can object some of the techniques employed therein) - but I don't think its a big drawback of the book. The worse thing is that there is too much code - not only snippets, but the whole programs. They take up precious place ans are hard to read from the paper anyway.
In the conclusion, it's not a brilliant book on the subject. Given the absence of the modern books on XUL programming and its relatively small size in terms of pages, I recommend you buy it if you want to get a taste of Firefox development, but if you need an old-school textbook, better opt for "Rapid development..." or whatever. I'm giving it four-stars anyway - there is no point for being too strict to the author and the publisher who are willing to promote good under-documented technology.
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
I expect quality from O'Reilly, 25 July 2007
By M. Golara - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Programming Firefox: Building Rich Internet Applications with XUL (Paperback)
Well well... I bought this book a month ago to develop a Firefox extension for work. I must say it's a terrible book. There's no pedagogy, and the content is VERY incomplete.
It deals mostly with XUL widget programming. it will teach you how to set the developer environment, how to interfere with the user, how to deploy THAT'S IT. poor examples, bad coding practices... I spent 60 box for this useless book...
14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
This book is OK, but the code samples are terrible, 20 Jun 2007
By B. Summers - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Programming Firefox: Building Rich Internet Applications with XUL (Paperback)
This is another book in which the author (or the publisher) couldn't be bothered to format its code samples. This would be so easy to do and I am sick of seeing this twisted, unreadable mess in my programming books.
Nested code is not indented, braces commonly do not line up, and barely any care was taken to indicate scope at all. It is also littered with useless comments that do not indicate the purpose of the code it should be describing, but rather to mark that the end of a block of code has been reached. Having a try-block followed by the comment " // try" is nowhere near as useful to me as if the code would have been readable in the first place.
The book is fairly respectable as a reference, however, and does make a nice complement to Essential XUL Programming, which is a little old but still quite serviceable.
Overall I would not purchase this book again. Combining the above mentioned text with the xulplanet web site is quite enough. My summary of this book is that it has the potential to be useful, but is generally very irritating to read.
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