I really do love the focus of this book. Honestly, by themselves, books on single languages tend to bore me to tears. But when the author, Robin Nixon, connects all the dots between them, it makes the material really come alive. You could easily skip to the CSS section, for example, if you’re having some styling issues with a site. If someone asks, "What can we do on our site to utilize HTML 5?" then you’ll have access to lots of cool things in that section. Each language has a short introduction to let you know just what the heck it does and why it’s important. I say it that way because the author also makes a point to speak in some pretty easy to understand and comfortable tones. More and more books are doing this nowadays, but it’s always nice to point it out.
Now, no section in this book is going to turn you into an expert on its respective subject. For example, there is a whole lot more to learn about relational databases, design, and queries than the chapters on MySQL will teach you. However, this book cleared up some concepts such as Normalization (as in the first, second, and third normal forms of a database) that I hadn’t quite gotten from other authors and sources. Sometimes just seeing something in a new way will help make the concept clear. But just to reiterate: you’ll want to buy a book dedicated to each language in this book if you really want to become an expert in that language.
It really does feel like the author has anticipated mistakes and has added some helpful tips in the right areas to prevent you from making those errors. This is another unique value to a dedicated book on a subject, from a competent author, rather than relying on Google and people on the internet. It’s great for instant results, but internet searches are often swing and miss, unless someone with a great deal of dedication has set up a comprehensive site on the subject. For example, a forum post on the internet might tell you to create a login.php file to go with your database accessing website. This book will teach you how to do that in a way that’s not going to post your passwords in clear text to the internet. It’s all about what you assume the reader knows, and just a few lines of code can be all that separates you from an embarrassing disaster.
There’s no CD or other digital media that goes with this book, but there are plenty of examples that you can easily copy to your environment. Appendices also have URLs to direct you to sites online where you can get further help with all of the languages mentioned in the book. There are also questions at the end of each chapter that you can use to test your comprehension.
If the last thing you did on the web was fire up an Geocities page and edit an html page in notepad, you are in need of a refresher. The languages and skills introduced here are basic and will not make you an expert in web design. But in today’s world, no matter what area of IT you specialize in, these languages are going to come up again and again. This is a great book to help you get your feet wet, and eventually, jump in.
