Of course I’ve not even read any of them (nor do I intend to) but if their Website content is anything to go by then yes…Three disasters! Just have a look at the table of contents for them and you’ll see for yourself what is in store for the reader!
If anyone here has any copies of these then maybe they could tell us about whether or not they are any better than the W3Schools Website or not. WILEY wouldn’t really publish out-of-date and shoddy learning material just because the books might be successful because of the name on them…Would they?
The W3Schools site is an ideal place to learn if you are living about six to eight years behind everyone else. Their books are probably the same - those released now probably give excellent coverage of best practices for 2002.
There are of course plenty of far better web sites around for learning those languages. For example http://webdesign.about.com is a far better site for learning HTML and CSS. I believe there are also one or two books to goth that site which are also probably far more useful than the W3Schools ones (since about.com has the editors and the backing of a big company while w3schools is just a hobby site set up by two people).
I’m pretty sure you have provided all the editorial review we need there Alex From a personal perspective I find most “beginner” coding books tend not to hit best practice principles, notable exception Mr Yanks’ PHP book that you can get from somewhere or other, source slips my mind. Found a lot of cool techniques and principles in that book.
If they had brought those books out about 10 years ago, they would probably be the biggest selling titles around (due to the brand name they have), however as their information is poorly maintained, and are considered by many in the industry to be among the worst of the beginner friendly websites (in terms of ensuring the knowledge meets certain standards), it’s a really stupid move on behalf of Wiley to release this kind of outdated trash into the already hurting book industry.
PS: According to reviews, it looks like the books are recycled trash from their website without any kind of editorial review on the quality.
w3schools is a good one-stop beginner refreence, and their inter-active try-its are useful tools to play with a particular concept. But I ALWAYS stress to my students that their code is not best practices, and provide an explanation of what would be best practice for that code. For example, their drop-down menu uses several tables instead of clean CSS, so I always show a JavaScript-CSS example, as well as a CSS only (no JavaScript) example.
As Molona said, I hope their books teach best practice and point out their online examples are not.
Let’s be honest. The W3Schools are one of the most famous sites… even if sometimes they’re a bit outdated, they do whole a bunch of interesting information on different technologies.
I think they wanted to get advantage of their names and that’s a good idea. The drawback is precisly that the website needs to update content as good practices are not always reflected. A titacnic work but that’s what the site exists, never the less.
I hope that the books do follow best practices and recommendation, and that they do explain why you should do it one way or the other. But I’m with you and I don’t know if that will be the case. That’s something that you don’t site on w3Schools.com so… maybe the book follows the same line of work
From a personal perspective I find most “beginner” coding books tend not to hit best practice principles, notable exception Mr Yanks’ PHP book that you can get from somewhere or other, source slips my mind. Found a lot of cool techniques and principles in that book.