Book Review: Building Web Applications with SVG

Review

Title: Building Web Applications with SVG
Author: David Dailey, Jon Frost, Domenico Strazzullo

I picked up this book because it was quite recent and wasn't focused on IE (despite being from MS Press).

Topics like drawing, filling, transformations and filters are explained well and detailed. Animations, adding CSS and Javascript and scripting with SMIL is also covered in detail.

Usage of masks, (one of the main reasons I wished to read an SVG book) is not too deeply explained, lacking for example info about when do masks intersect and when they add, or even how to apply multiple masks to the same item. For some advanced topics I've had more luck reading the W3C draft.

Being XML, some examples get harder to read due to lots of lines and sometimes bad indentation. Leaving more blank space between blocks would have made easier to read the book, instead of trying to fit the example in just one page (which sometimes anyway doesn't happens). It is much better to read the code samples and run them in your machine (many URLs of the book throw 404s).

Tools section could be much smaller (lots of useless images to take up more pages), and the case studies final chapter looked like more fill but as contains a quite extensive Pergola, D3 and Polymaps it is actually useful and interesting..

Overall, a quite good book to introduce yourself into SVG.