This weeks book review is of a book titled ‘Dreamweaver CS5.5 Mobile and Web Development with HTML5, CSS3, and jQuery’. Now my first comment has to be what a mouthful that is to say, won’t help with any word of mouth advertising but it is informative to what the book covers.

So starting the book I looked upon the contents page and was overwhelmed with the number of topics being covered. At 284 pages my first impression is that the author has tried to cover to much in to little, this worries me from the start as when I purchase a book I expect a minimum level of depth of what I am reading. Rather than stop at the contents page though I decided to persevere and read the book for the purpose of this review.

Upon reading the preface the book starts to irritate me, for one, many working in the web development industry will disagree with the comment ‘Dreamweaver is the most powerful and industry-leading web design software’. A large number of web developers do have Dreamweaver installed but this is usually because it ships with the creative suite which most developers have for photoshop, illustrator and fireworks. Agencies like the one I work for buy creative suite as a package rather than just buying the applications people need, this is usually because it is the cheaper option. I personally only use Dreamweaver for quick amends and email builds, large web builds are done using expresso. Anyway that’s a argument for another day, I just feel people reading the book want to read about using the technologies in Dreamweaver and are going to already know what it is so we don’t need to be informed of this.

So as I continue to read the book I start to realise its not really for professional web developers, it spends to much time covering the GUI rather than the power of the Dreamweaver code editor. I think had I been a web designer I may have been able to learn a lot from the book but as a professional web developer I found it very lacking. Had the writer concentrated more on using the code editor I could have been writing a more favourable review.

The books main saviour is its coverage of creating mobile applications from within Dreamweaver, unfortunately this section is only 10 pages long which is far to little for such an amazing feature of Dreamweaver CS5.5. O’Reilley have an entire book on this subject called Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript which does a much better job at getting you started with writing your own mobile applications using HTML5.

Overall I am disappointed by this book, it fails to live up to my expectations, I was expecting to learn about how I can use all these cool technologies with Dreamweaver from the coding perspective. I wasn’t looking to learn about how to create pages using a GUI so if your looking to get your feet wet with HTML5 you are advised to look elsewhere.

So onto the scores,

Value for money – 1/10 – For a web developer this isnt going to be good value for money, there are many more books on the market which will be more suitable

Ease of understanding – 7/10 – While I didn’t enjoy the book it is certainly still easy to understand

Level of prior knowledge required – none. – no knowledge is really required as it guides you through using the GUI to create pages, this book is certainly better for web designers rather than web developers.

If you want to check out the book look at it over on the publishers site Packt Publishing

Unless you are living under a rock, you will have all have heard Steve Jobs, co-founder of apple, technology visionary passed away on Wednesday at 7:35 p.m. He really inspired me and the work he did to change the world will continue to inspire me long after her has gone.

My condolences go out to his family in this difficult time and I hope they are left alone to grieve in peace. May memory of the fantastic work he has done inspire others to continue to make a difference to the world and ‘think differently’.

For my second book review I have chosen to review a book titled JQuery UI 1.7 published by PackT Publishing about jQuery UI. As you may be aware I love to write my own jQuery plugins but I have barely scraped on the surface when it comes to using jQuery UI.

My prior knowledge of jQuery UI focuses on using it for accordions which jQuery UI is abit overkill for as you can write your own accordion in less than 10 lines of code. My focus therefore when reading this book is to learn what else I can get out of using JQuery UI for my projects to save me time and make my site easier to use for my users.

When first picking up the book I looked through the contents page and I saw that the book is clearly broken up into sections detailing each feature of jQuery UI. This is great for people who do not have time to read a entire book and would rather just use it as a reference tool and be able to go straight to a section they need.

I started with reading the introduction and it showed me the high quality of the authors writing, he explains the JQuery UI file structure very well. He does mention using a CDN to host your jQuery and jQuery UI javascript files but doesn’t provide the link to the CDN which would have been useful. Overall the first chapter is a good start for the book and gets your ready to get your hands dirty.

Moving on to the rest of the book, as previously mentioned the book is laid out into sections for each key feature of jQuery UI. This is great for dipping in and out of the book when you need it however if you are still relatively new to jQuery going through the book and doing all the examples may help you to develop your knowledge of jQuery.

When reading a book like this it’s important to compare it against the closest similar resource available, which for jQuery UI is the JQuery UI demo library.. I believe its in this comparison that the book really shines, when navigating the demo library there are lots of tabs to switch through and options to expand to find what you want, with the book there are lists of all the different options and then detailed walkthroughs on how to use them. I found the book much quicker at helping me find the answers to questions I had when coding and it really was a time saver.

The main issue I found with the version of the book I was using (ePub version) is that the code examples were all in blue (colour for different types of tags like a IDE has would have been nice). Related to this the code samples also lack indentation which would have made it easier to read. Other than that he book was very easy to read and is a great reference tool, it’s now got a permanent home on my iPad for whenever I need it.

So now for the scoring

Value for money – 6/10 – although the ebook is fairly cheap there are many free resources on the web which are adequate for most people, I think if this book was priced at £4.99 mark it would be a must have due to it being a quicker reference than these online resource and as the saying goes, time is money. While I don’t want to undervalue the writers work info however feel at price elasticity of demand rules apply here and the lower price would increase sales.

Ease of understanding – 8/10

Level of prior knowledge required – intermediate. – this book works great as a jQuery UI reference but you need to have a solid foundation in understanding how to use jQuery

This book is available direct from the publishers.