| ...". However, when the next paragraph talks about the associated CSS rule, it assigns a value of "tagline" to the id selector in the sample, "td#tagline { ...". This sort of incongruity considerably lengthens, and potentially derails, the learning curve of the diligent reader. Some of these (including the example shown above) are included in the considerable listing of errata available from the www.wrox.com Internet site; others are not. In short,the book could have benefited from a stronger editorial eye prior to publication.
The book's gutting and reconstruction of the First Promotions site provides the reader with tangible evidence that functionality and aesthetics do not need to be compromised in order to improve the accessibility of websites. Although the author had recommended actually editing the sample website's HTML files available from the publisher's Internet site, this reader found that simply studying the markup examples in the text was sufficient to gain an understanding of the principles being discussed. The book's well-designed format for illustrating the markup changes examined in the text provides a strong communication tool enabling the reader to rather easily follow the author's design plan as he explains the transformations he is making.
It is evident that Duckett cares about making websites accessible to users with disabilities. Even if you are already conversant with XHTML and CSS, the two chapters on accessibility are almost worth the price of the book. As a package, the book provides a practical introduction to all three topics for its intended audience, the experienced designer and builder of HTML-based websites.
Craig S. Booher has over 20 years experience as an information professional designing, developing, and implementing information systems in academic libraries and corporate information centers.
Copyright © 2006 by Craig S. Booher. This document may be reproduced in whole or in part for noncommercial, educational, or scientific purposes, provided that the preceding copyright statement and source are clearly acknowledged. All other rights are reserved. For permission to reproduce or adapt this document or any part of it for commercial distribution, address requests to the author at csbooher@athenet.net .
 
REVIEW OF: Nigel MacFarlane. (2005). Firefox Hacks. O’Reilly and Associates: Sebastopol, CA. (ISBN: 0-596-00928-3)
by Shirley Duglin Kennedy
I dunno. Maybe it’s just me, experiencing techno-burnout. But this book is way too much for moi.
I like Firefox a lot. I never bothered downloading and installing it when my primary home computer was a WinXP machine. Just lazy, I guess. But early this year, I bought an iBook. When I discovered that Safari, the Mac OS native browser, did not work with Blogger (as well as many other things), I decided to give Firefox a try. I’m glad I did. Now there is no going back. And I was, quite frankly, eager to get my hands on this book. But I’m having a heck of a lot of trouble getting into it.
This is not a book for the casual Web surfer or the Internet user who just wants something to work reliably and is not at all interested in poking around under the hood. Firefox is a very rich browser, in terms of features and possibilities for customization, and McFarlane -- a Mozilla/Firefox guru who died suddenly and prematurely this past June (http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=6842) -- shows you how to squeeze every drop of extra utility out of the browser. If that is what you want to do.
I was able to claw my way through the first four chapters of the book Firefox Basics, Security, Installation, and Web Surfing Enhancements, although it got real geeky, real fast. It’s good to know a bit about the installation and configuration processes for the browser (e.g., where it deposits its files, how to tweak its appearance, performance, etc.,) to best suit your individual needs. The OS-agnostic among us will find it gratifying that the book covers numerous flavors of Windows, Mac OS, Linux and Unix.
Chapter 1 is an overview of the browser’s features from an end-user perspective, including page display, navigation, performance, keyboard shortcuts, searching, etc.
Chapter 2 deals with security and is well worth your time, especially if you are responsible for computers in a public access environment. Firefox is a good choice for public computers; it’s quite flexible in terms of how tightly it can be locked down, and is widely regarded as much more secure than Internet Explorer. Its open source nature means that if a security issue is discovered, it is promptly addressed by a worldwide development community. Covered here are password handling, controlling foreign code such as ActiveX embedded in web pages, automatic updates and locking down the browser to protect dummies (e.g.,setting up security for non-technical users).
Of additional interest to those who may be nursemaiding public computers, Chapter 3 covers installation in depth, offering configuration suggestions for different types of users and environments. This is where configuration options, profiles, etc., are covered. You will learn where to find complimentary applications for the browser and how to get it ready for wide deployment across an entire facility as well as manage user profiles remotely.
Chapter 4, Web Surfing Enhancements will be of interest to serious Web users, as it discusses bookmark enhancements, tabbed browsing, control over image and ad displays, news and feeds, search plug-ins and extensions, etc. One hack shows you how to save lots and lots of web pages to your local disk without hassle: helpful if you do a lot of Web research.
After that, things became a little too intense for me. I’m much less involved with cutting edge technology in my job these days; I do very little Web development and don’t use things like XML (except tangentially, as a consumer of RSS, etc.). Chapters 5 through 9 are definitely aimed at power users, web and application developers, and folks who want to create their own extensions and themes and otherwise make major changes to the way Firefox looks and works. One of the cool things about an open source browser, of course, is that it is so malleable, and people with far more skill than I possess have developed add-ons for Firefox that have enhanced my own browsing experience.
Thus, some of the hacks further along in the book are worth a look (e.g., Hack #52: Stomp on Cookies, explains how to track, trap, configure, kill create, and otherwise diddle with HTTP cookies). And if you have the need, Hack #81 shows you how to hide a content filter in Firefox’s core to make websites vanish like ninjas in the dark.
As with all O’Reilly and Associates books generally, this title is well-indexed. And you can see and try some sample hacks at the O’Reilly web page for this book: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/firefoxhks/. By and large, all of the books in the Hacks series (http://hacks.oreilly.com/) are worth having around, even if the content is often beyond the level of the average Internet or computer user. Keep in mind that these are not books most folks will want to read cover-to-cover, but by browsing the tables of contents and indexes, you may be able to solve a specific problem that you or someone you work with is having.
Shirl Kennedy is the base librarian at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida. She writes the Internet Waves column for Information Today, and serves as deputy editor of ResourceShelf.com and editor of DocuTicker.com.
Copyright © 2006 by Shirley Duglin Kennedy. This document may be reproduced in whole or in part for noncommercial, educational, or scientific purposes, provided that the preceding copyright statement and source are clearly acknowledged. All other rights are reserved. For permission to reproduce or adapt this document or any part of it for commercial distribution, address requests to the author at webdoyenne@gmail.com.
REVIEW OF: Andrew Watt. (2005). Beginning Regular Expressions. Indianapolis, IN: Wiley Publishing Inc. (ISBN: 0-7645-7489-2).
by Mark Cyzyk
My programming career began with an attempt to compile a book-length bibliography of doctoral dissertations in philosophy. Such a large, textual work inevitably required substantial formatting and reformatting. In order to automate this process I learned all about the macro language supplied with WordPerfect 5.0 for DOS. It was simple, but powerful. As a programming novice at the time, the only routines I learned were simple search and replace functions. Running a very long macro on a very long piece of text on a very slow 8080 processor took a very long time, so I quickly learned that when searching and replacing certain patterns of strings in a large textual document one must be careful. The machine, after all, is literal in a way that we humans typically are not. One of the great virtues of this book is that it points out the things that can go wrong when programmatically manipulating text via regular expressions and shows how those problems can be circumvented or solved.
But first, what is a regular expression? A "regular expression" is a pattern of characters in a text. It is "regular" insofar as it is identifiable and can therefore be used to match a pattern wherever it may occur throughout a text. Now, why the terminology here is denoted by the term "regular expression" instead of something more intuitive like "pattern matching" I don't know. But after all, we live in a technological world in which one of the key concepts of HTTP, the foundation of the World Wide Web, is spelled "referer". When confronted by the technical term "regular expression" I simply do an immediate internal translation to "pattern matching", and all is well.
This book consists of twenty-six chapters, the first ten illustrate the various aspects of regular expression technology, the remaining sixteen provide useful illustrations of how regular expressions are implemented in the top programming languages and applications. The core of the book is to be found in Chapters 3 through 9.
Chapter 3: Simple Regular Expressions
This chapter introduces and illustrates how to write a regular expression for use in matching patterns in text where the pattern to be matched consists of single characters, multiple characters in a string, optional characters, as well as using special "metacharacters", characters that have a special meaning within a regular expression to specify such things as match a class of characters; match any character; match within a certain range of characters; match a pattern zero or more times; match a pattern one or more times; and match a pattern a specified minimum and maximum number of times within a string of text. This is an introductory chapter to these topics which sets the stage for the chapters that follow.
Chapter 4: Metacharacters and Modifiers
A regular expression can be very simple, something for example like this: cat. This simple regular expression would match any sequence of a c followed by an a followed by a t in a string of text. So it would match that string as it appears in the words cat, cats, catalog, catastrophe, concatenation, etc. Metacharacters provide for more sophisticated pattern matching. Suppose for example you wanted to find all instances of cat or cut in a text. The period (.) metacharacter would allow you to do so: c.t. The period metacharacter matches any character. This chapter illustrates the use of the following metacharacters:
| . |
Matches any character |
| \w |
Matches characters in the English alphabet, numeric characters, and the underscore |
| \W |
Matches any character not matched by \w |
| \d |
Matches a numeric digit |
| \D |
Matches any character not matched by \d |
| \s |
Matches a single space, a tab, or a newline character |
| \S |
Matches any character not matched by \s |
| \t |
Matches a single tab character |
| \n |
Matches a single newline character escaped characters. Characters like the period and the backslash themselves must be "escaped" with a backslash: \. and \ |
Chapter 5: Character Classes
Character classes are convenient ways to match a range or entire classes of characters in a text. For instance:
| [a-z] |
Matches any single lowercase alphabetic character |
| [a-z]+ |
Matches any number of lowercase alphabetic characters |
| [A-Z] |
Matches any single uppercase alphabetic character |
| [0-9] |
Matches any numeric digit |
| [aeiou] |
Matches any vowel |
| Parentheses can be used to group items: |
| (33|44) |
Matches either a 33 or a 44 in a text |
| Use of quantifiers specify how many characters to match: |
| [aeiou]{2} |
Matches any two consecutive vowels |
| Negated character classes can be specified with the metacharacter : |
| [^a-z] |
Matches any single character that is not a lowercase alphabetic |
Chapter 6: String, Line, and Word Boundaries
Metacharacter "anchors" are used to denote start and end of lines, and beginning and ends of words:
| ^ |
Matches the start of a line of text |
| $ |
Matches the end of a line of text |
| ^$ |
Matches a blank line |
| \b |
Matches either the beginning or the ending of a word |
| \<< /> |
Matches the beginning of a word |
| \> |
Matches the ending of a word |
Chapter 7: Parentheses in Regular Expressions
Just as one uses parentheses to group elements in a Boolean search query, so too are they used in regular expressions to group parts of the expression.
| (Doctor|Dr|Dr\.) |
Matches "Doctor" "Dr" or "Dr." |
Watt briefly discusses, in this chapter, the notion of "capturing" parentheses, something that strikes me as being extraordinarily powerful. Essentially, programming languages and applications that allow for capturing parenthesis will match what is inside the parentheses and assign what is found there to a numbered variable name. The example Watt gives is:
(United) (States)
as used against the text:
The United States
In this case, the first parenthetical expression will match the string "United" in the text and will assign the value found there to a variable named "$1". The second parenthetical expression will match against the string "States" in the text and will assign the value found there to a variable named "$2". These two variables are now available for use by the programmer.
Chapter 8: Lookahead and Lookbehind
Another powerful feature of regular expressions is the ability to match a pattern based on a previously matched pattern or based on a pattern being followed by another pattern. This is called lookahead and lookbehind. There are several different flavors of these two features, but just as an example, here is what Watt uses to illustrate a "positive lookahead":
Star(?=Training)
Basically this regular expression says "Find the string 'Star', but only if it is immediately followed by the string 'Training'".
Lookahead and lookbehind, with their variants, surely are powerful programming constructs.
Chapter 9: Sensitivity and Specificity in Regular Expressions
The moral of this instructive chapter is: Sensitivity and specificity in a regular expression act in mutually opposing ways such that an increase in the sensitivity of an expression most often results in the decrease of specificity, and vice versa. So increasing either usually results in a tradeoff: The more sensitive your search, the more "false hits" are likely to result; the more specific your search, the more likely it will result in relevant items being excluded. Watt provides solid examples of this principle in action.
Chapters 11-26 discuss and illustrate the implementation of regular expressions in such applications, application programming platforms, and programming languages as: Microsoft Word; StarOffice/OpenOffice; findstr; PowerGREP; Microsoft Excel; SQL Server 2000; MySQL; Microsoft Access; JScript and Javascript; VBScript; Visual Basic .NET; C#; W3C XML Schema; Java; and Perl.
A chapter on regular expressions and Python would have been nice, but I suppose the line had to be drawn somewhere and an already very large book (742 pages) brought to an end. The other thing I would have liked to see is the provision of an Appendix briefly summarizing the syntax of regular expressions, a visual summary of the first several chapters -- sort of a Quick Lookup area of the book that could be easily accessible to the working programmer.
Overall, the book is informative, comprehensive, well-written, and is therefore easily readable. The examples are well thought out and clear. I think this book is ideal for someone starting out with regular expression programming and it also would have great value to the programmer who, for instance, needs to switch programming languages, from, say, Java or Perl to PHP.
In the end it's all about solving programming problems. Suppose, for instance, you are given a file of text consisting of what appears to be IP addresses, each on its own line, but you need to match just the strings that actually are valid IPs and weed out the rest. How to do this?
It's simple - just match on the following regular expression!:
^((25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|1[0-9][0-9]|[1-9][0-9]|[0-9])\.){3}(24[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|1[0-9][0-9]|[1-9][0-9]|[0-9])$
Mark Cyzyk, formerly Head of Information Technology in the Albert S. Cook Library at Towson University, is currently the Web Architect at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.
Copyright © 2006 by Mark Cyzyk. This document may be reproduced in whole or in part for noncommercial, educational, or scientific purposes, provided that the preceding copyright statement and source are clearly acknowledged. All other rights are reserved. For permission to reproduce or adapt this document or any part of it for commercial distribution, address requests to the author at mcyzyk@jhu.edu.
REVIEW OF: Richard York. (2005). Beginning CSS: Cascading Style Sheets for Web Design. Indianapolis, IN : Wiley Publishing Inc. (ISBN:0-7645-7642-9)
by David B. Malone
Richard York's work is well thought out and benefits greatly from a useful layout that includes numerous screenshots and portions of actual code. This volume is very practical for beginners, but can also be helpful for more experienced designers. An interesting feature of York's text is the intentional pedagogical approach. York provides definitions for new terms as they are introduced and provides a context for better understanding. He suggests mnemonics to aid the reader in grasping new concepts. Nearly every chapter is punctuated with a summary and a set of exercises for the reader to utilize to reinforce the content of the chapter. Answers to the exercises are provided in one of the very useful appendices, which also include a cascading style sheets (CSS) quick reference guide and other coding tools. Roughly, the first half of the book introduces CSS and its syntax while the remainder highlights the variety of properties that can be used to implement CSS.
Interestingly, hypertext markup language (HTML), a sublanguage of the larger standard generalized markup language (SGML) family, was created as a method to reflect the structural elements of a document-never intending to serve the layout or design needs of a webpage. This mixed-up nature shows the shift between a textual, or word-oriented, culture to a visual one. Since HTML doesn't have the capacity to manage the needs of a visual medium-the World Wide Web-some other mechanism is needed. CSS provides the ability of adding a few simple strings of code that can dramatically change the look and feel of a webpage. This is where CSS enters the alphabet-soup of the Internet.
Another element of York's encouraging beginners towards the future of web design is his focus on combining CSS with the emerging extensible hypertext markup language (XHTML) and the broader extensible markup language (XML). The Web, in its fullest sense and within particular websites, continues to grow at astounding rates. York shows how CSS can provide the means of managing the display of variety web content in a centralized manner. Though not included on a CD-ROM within the book itself, the thousands of lines of CSS code provided within the book are available for download from the publisher. The text would prove more appealing, however, if the code were included; especially in light of the extra steps needed to download the source code and given that the notice of the code's availability is buried within York's beneficial introduction.
With increasing access to the Internet and a wider range of Internet users, York addresses disability issues, particularly vision impairments, and relates their impact on CSS and web design as he encourages designers to seek greater accessibility. And related, cellular telephone usage is expanding worldwide and the growth in web-enabled telephony is increasing. Recognizing this, York is forward thinking in providing direction to developers in addressing the needs of handheld users. Additionally, in a world of numerous web browsers, York delves into the sticky world of cross-browser compatibility. Other compatibility issues revolve around addressing failures of properly rendered CSS in Microsoft's Internet Explorer-the browser with the largest installed base.
For the beginning web developer or the experienced coder, York's work provides easy access to a wealth of information regarding the benefits and implementation of cascading style sheets. He doesn't simply present a litany of code, but provides some theoretical issues to consider, thus creating a volume that is a useful guide to an important aspect of web design.
David B. Malone is Head, Archives and Special Collections at the Buswell Memorial Library, Wheaton College, Illinois.
Copyright © 2006 by David B. Malone. This document may be reproduced inwhole or in part for noncommercial, educational, or scientific purposes, provided that the preceding copyright statement and source are clearly acknowledged. All other rights are reserved. For permission to reproduce or adapt this document or any part of it for commercial distribution, address requests to the author at David.B.Malone@wheaton.edu
Editor is Sharon Rankin, McGill University (sharon.rankin@mcgill.ca).
Editorial Board:
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