Svg Unleashed

A bad review's one thing, but Justin Taylor's is largely nonsense and appears to have been written without reading the book. His suggestion that XML is "the future" and "needs to be addressed" is just plain bizarre - SVG is an XML language! XML is introduced in the book, and the whole thing could be said to be addressing XML. Coverage of Javascript, or to be more accurate ECMAScript (the ECMA/ISO standard) is included because SVG supports it as its primary scripting language. It's like criticising a book on automobiles for covering "old-fashioned" internal combustion engines. Yes, there are drawbacks to running scripts client-side, but the developers of SVG thought it useful enough to include a language binding within the spec itself. ECMAScript is a current standard, in widespread use. Many wireless devices support ECMAScript, have done for years - Nokia and so on incorporated it for WAP support, long before they started with SVG. Working with server-side languages and SVG is a different matter entirely - the book has extended examples and case studies in most popular languages.

Targeted to the experienced Web programmer, SVG Unleashed deftly equips the reader with the practical knowledge required in order to create and manipulate Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) programmatically, both on the client and the server side. Part I of SVG Unleashed provides a thorough reference of SVG syntax, elements, coordinate systems and animations, with coverage of the XML Document Object Model(DOM) and the SVG DOM application to each element or attribute. Part II of SVG Unleashed introduces client-side SVG programming with particular emphasis on the use of ECMAScript/JavaScript. In Part III of SVG Unleashed readers learn to use several server-side languages to create SVG documents. Part IV of SVG Unleashed demonstrates SVG programming through several case studies. User Level: Intermediate, 1152 pages