Dynamic HTML in Action

The early portions of this book will look familiar to anyone who's built any sort of Web page, since the authors cover traditional HTML tags first. From there, they proceed to show how to incorporate client-side scripts in HTML documents by providing a fine tutorial on event handlers, data structures, control structures, and the relevant aspects of object orientation, particularly in JavaScript. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)--still the most popular way to define complex styles--get excellent explanatory treatment. Dynamic HTML in Action also shows how to integrate scripting by using scripts to alter styles. Filters and transitions are well documented, along with embedded multimedia.

This book isn't all about appearances. There's solid coverage of Dynamic HTML's capacity to work with Data Source Objects (DSOs) and data bindings that provide efficient connections between client-side documents and back-end databases. And while the authors stop well short of fully documenting Extensible Markup Language (XML), they do provide an excellent introduction to the capabilities of this up-and-coming data-description system. --David Wall