Programming the World Wide Web [Paperback]

If you're seeking a book that will prepare you for a career as a web developer, this isn't what you're looking for. It's neither a programming tutorial nor a book on specific environments, such as .NET. However, if you're doing maintenance programming in, say, RPG/400 or writing JCL and are wondering how you can refactor your skills and get out of the mid-range and mainframe environment this book is ideal.

Solid programming skills are assumed (preferably in C or C++, but that isn't essential). You should have a basic understanding of databases and data structures. If you have these skills this book will systematically familiarize you with the web programming environment and common tools and programming languages that you'll need to master in order to transition out of the data center. I like the way the book touches all of the key knowledge areas, starting with HTML and going through javascript, perl and the usual cast of mark-up, scripting and programming languages. More importantly, this book doesn't skim the surface - it does into databases, XML and server-side development. If you've read the table of contents and are tempted to question why CGI was included in such a relatively new book, bear in mind that most of the information in this book is ideal for maintenance programmers, and there are literally thousands of systems that still employ CGI scripts. This also reinforces my opinion about who will benefit most from this book - maintenance programmers from mid-range and mainframe environments.

In a nutshell, you bring your knowledge of algorithms, data structures and development methodologies, and the book will show you how to apply them to web programming.

If you are familiar with the author's book (in its many editions) on programming languages, all I can say is that this is written in a similar style - thorough and very academic. There are code examples demonstrating what is being discussed, and there are summaries in each chapter as well as exercises and review questions, but you might be left wondering "what is the big picture here?". It by no means has the programming manual style of an O'Reilly book that often works through one big project - or several of them - as a way of teaching you internet programming principles. The good thing about this book is that the author has covered each subject very thoroughly. The bad thing is that you will need to read the book in short doses digesting each portion slowly as his style is quite academic and each page is densely packed with information. Since the last edition the author has added three chapters covering Ruby, Rails, and Ajax.

I would say this book is OK if you have a pretty good background in programming in C and C++ and already know something about web programming since there is only one preliminary chapter and it is rather vague. If you don't have such a background, let me recommend the various "Head First" books by O'Reilly and Associates on the subject as well as their other various books on web programming. You might wind up with more books and spend more money than if you buy this one, but I think your journey through the world of web programming will probably be more enjoyable and more comprehensible. There is no table of contents listed for this book in the product description, so I do that next:

Chapter 1 Fundamentals
1.1 A Brief Introduction to the Internet
1.2 The World Wide Web
1.3 Web Browsers
1.4 Web Servers
1.5 Uniform Resource Locators
1.6 Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions
1.7 The Hypertext Transfer Protocol
1.8 Security
1.9 The Web Programmer's Toolbox
1.10 Summary
Review Questions
Exercises

Chapter 2 Introduction to XHTML
2.1 Origins and Purposes of HTML and XHTML
2.2 Basic Syntax
2.3 Standard XHTML Document Structure
2.4 Basic Text Markup
2.5 Images
2.6 Hypertext Links
2.7 Lists
2.8 Tables
2.9 Forms
2.10 Frames
2.11 Syntactic Differences between HTML and XHTML
2.12 Summary
Review Questions
Exercises

Chapter 3 Cascading Style Sheets
3.1 Introduction
3.2 Levels of Style Sheets
3.3 Style Specification Formats
3.4 Selector Formats
3.5 Property Value Forms
3.6 Font Properties
3.7 List Properties
3.8 Color
3.9 Alignment of Text
3.10 The Box Model
3.11 Background Images
3.12 The span and div Tags
3.13 Summary
Review Questions
Exercises

Chapter 4 The Basics of JavaScript
4.1 Overview of JavaScript
4.2 Object Orientation and JavaScript
4.3 General Syntactic Characteristics
4.4 Primitives, Operations, and Expressions
4.5 Screen Output and Keyboard Input
4.6 Control Statements
4.7 Object Creation and Modification
4.8 Arrays
4.9 Functions
4.10 An Example
4.11 Constructors
4.12 Pattern Matching Using Regular Expressions
4.13 Another Example
4.14 Errors in Scripts
4.15 Summary
Review Questions
Exercises

Chapter 5 JavaScript and HTML Documents
5.1 The JavaScript Execution Environment
5.2 The Document Object Model
5.3 Element Access in JavaScript
5.4 Events and Event Handling
5.5 Handling Events from Body Elements
5.6 Handling Events from Button Elements
5.7 Handling Events from Text Boxes and Password Elements
5.8 The DOM 2 Event Model
5.9 The navigator Object
5.10 DOM Tree Traversal and Modification
5.11 Summary
Review Questions
Exercises

Chapter 6 Dynamic Documents with JavaScript
6.1 Introduction
6.2 Positioning Elements
6.3 Moving Elements
6.4 Element Visibility
6.5 Changing Colors and Fonts
6.6 Dynamic Content
6.7 Stacking Elements
6.8 Locating the Mouse Cursor
6.9 Reacting to a Mouse Click
6.10 Slow Movement of Elements
6.11 Dragging and Dropping Elements
6.12 Summary
Review Questions
Exercises

Chapter 7 Introduction to XML
7.1 Introduction
7.2 The Syntax of XML
7.3 XML Document Structure
7.4 Document Type Definitions
7.5 Namespaces
7.6 XML Schemas
7.7 Displaying Raw XML Documents
7.8 Displaying XML Documents with CSS
7.9 XSLT Style Sheets
7.10 XML Processors
7.11 Web Services
7.12 Summary
Review Questions
Exercises

Chapter 8 The Basics of Perl
8.1 Origins and Uses of Perl
8.2 Scalars and Their Operations
8.3 Assignment Statements and Simple Input and Output
8.4 Control Statements
8.5 Fundamentals of Arrays
8.6 Hashes
8.7 References
8.8 Functions
8.9 Pattern Matching
8.10 File Input and Output
8.11 An Example
8.12 Summary
Review Questions
Exercises

Chapter 9 Using Perl for CGI Programming
9.1 The Common Gateway Interface
9.2 CGI Linkage
9.3 Query String Format
9.4 The CGI.pm Module
9.5 A Survey Example
9.6 Cookies
9.7 Summary
Review Questions
Exercises

Chapter 10 Servlets and Java Server Pages
10.1 Overview of Servlets
10.2 Servlet Details
10.3 A Survey Example
10.4 Storing Information on Clients
10.5 Java Server Pages
10.6 Summary
Review Questions
Exercises

Chapter 11 Introduction to PHP
11.1 Origins and Uses of PHP
11.2 Overview of PHP
11.3 General Syntactic Characteristics
11.4 Primitives, Operations, and Expressions
11.5 Output
11.6 Control Statements
11.7 Arrays
11.8 Functions
11.9 Pattern Matching
11.10 Form Handling
11.11 Files
11.12 Cookies
11.13 Session Tracking
11.14 Summary
Review Questions
Exercises

Chapter 12 Introduction to ASPNET
12.1 Overview of the .NET Framework
12.2 Overview of C#
12.3 Introduction to ASPNET
12.4 ASP.NET Controls
12.5 Web Services
12.6 Summary
Review Questions
Exercises

Chapter 13 Database Access through the Web
13.1 Relational Databases
13.2 An Introduction to the Structured Query Language
13.3 Architectures for Database Access
13.4 The MySQL Database System
13.5 Database Access with Perl and MySQL
13.6 Database Access with PHP and MySQL
13.7 Database Access with JDBC and MySQL
13.8 Summary
Review Questions
Exercises

Chapter 14 Introduction to Ruby
14.1 Origins and Uses of Ruby
14.2 Scalar Types and Their Operations
14.3 Simple Input and Output
14.4 Control Statements
14.5 Fundamentals of Arrays
14.6 Hashes
14.7 Methods
14.8 Classes
14.9 Code Blocks and Iterators
14.10 Pattern Matching
14.11 Summary
Review Questions
Exercises

Chapter 15 Introduction to Rails
15.1 Overview of Rails
15.2 Document Requests
15.3 Processing Forms
15.4 Rails Applications and Databases
15.5 Layouts
15.6 Summary
Review Questions
Exercises

Chapter 16 Introduction to Ajax
16.1 Overview of Ajax
16.2 The Basics of Ajax
16.3 Rails with Ajax
16.4 Summary
Review Questions
Exercises

This book has a great overview of many of the important aspects/languages required to make great web pages. I am currently using this book in a computer science class, and it has been very helpful. The only problem is that it doesn't give many specific examples. This can be overcome though through sites like www.w3schools.com and www.php.net