Title: Book Review: Building Web Applications with SVG
Slug: book-review-building-web-applications-with-svg
Date: 2013-03-09 14:21:00
Author: Kartones
Lang: en
Tags: Reviews, Graphics, Books, HTML
og_image: https://images.kartones.net/posts/screenshots/book_web_apps_with_svg.jpg
Description: A review of the book 'Building Web Applications with SVG', by David Dailey, Jon Frost, Domenico Strazzullo.

<h3>Review</h3>

<p><img alt="Building Web Applications with SVG" src="https://images.kartones.net/posts/screenshots/book_web_apps_with_svg.jpg"></p>

<p>
<b>Title</b>: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/0735660123/" rel="nofollow">Building Web Applications with SVG</a><br>
<b>Author</b>: David Dailey, Jon Frost, Domenico Strazzullo<br></p>

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

<p>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.</p>

<p>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 <a href="http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/IG/resources/svgprimer.html" rel="nofollow">the W3C
draft</a>.</p>

<p>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).</p>

<p>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..</p>

<p>Overall, a quite good book to introduce yourself into SVG.</p>