Amazon.co.uk Review
SVG Essentials is a programmer's guide to Scalable Vector Graphics, the official W3C recommendation for portable, scaleable images on the Web. SVG is an XML application, and has great potential as a standard, open and powerful technique for including rich graphics and animation in Web pages. Macromedia's proprietary Flash plug-in is widely used for the same purpose, but SVG is the official solution. Complete with hundreds of code examples along with both colour and black-and-white illustrations, this title describes the SVG specification and shows how to create and manipulate SVG documents. The book uses open-source technology throughout, and readers should already be familiar with both XML and Java.
The author begins with an overview of SVG, and goes on to describe the coordinate system, the basic shapes, and how documents are structured. Chapters on paths, patterns and gradients show how to create and fill any shape, including Bezier curves. Text gets a chapter of its own, explaining how to make text follow a path or even make it read right-to-left, for international language support. Sections on clipping, masking and filters cover these more advanced graphical techniques, and an important chapter covers animation and Javascript scripting. The book goes on to show how to generate SVG from other XML data, such as MathML, used to describe mathematical symbols and equations. Finally, there is a chapter on how to serve up SVG using Java servlets.
Clearly written and logically presented, this is an excellent choice for Web developers who want to get started with SVG. --Tim Anderson
Keith Shengili-Roberts, Computer Paper June 2002
"....those who want the nitty-gritty on this emerging Web Graphics format will be hard pressed to find something better."
by Shelley Powers
by David Flanagan
by David Flanagan
by Bjarne Stroustrup
