Books for/about - svg

Publisher: O'Reilly Media
Authors: Michael Fitzgerald

ISBN: 0596003277
List Price: $34.95
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Summary: A good introductory book on XSLT
Learning XSLT was a helpful introduction to XSLT and I really enjoyed my progress through the book. Mr. Fitzgerald doesn't spend too much time on lengthy explanations. Simple explanations are followed by illustrative examples that you should type and run yourself.

Summary: good and bad
I found Learning XSLT confusing from a beginner's point of view. It's poorly indexed, and Fitzgerald often uses XSLT vocabulary in examples long before he explains what they are. For example the "select" attribute first appears on page 105 in an example describing the lang() function, without any explanation of what it is or how it should be used. It's not listed at all in the index except in relation to the "for-each" and "sort" elements. He has a nice list of string functions but not much explanation of what kinds of contexts they can be used in, and few examples. He doesn't really explain how "match" and "select" are used together, or how processing works hierarchically by jumping between xsl snippets. Like a lot of O'Reilly books it presumes a pretty sophisticated programming vocabulary (like what does "normalize" mean anyway?).

Some sections are quite useful however, and the fact that there are lots of examples is very helpful.

Summary: Dissapointing presentation. Needs a rewrite
The information is presented very dryly. The tone of the book is very taxing on the readers attention span.

I find that one of the key tenets of these O'Reilly books is that they are usually very readable, and can be read front to back almost like a novel. I didn't find I was able to do this with Learning XSLT.

Maybe it's the subject matter or maybe its the authors inability to hook the reader. Either way, it didn't work for me.

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Fundamentals of SVG Programming: Concepts to Source Code (Graphics Series)

Publisher: Charles River Media
Authors: Oswald Campesato

ISBN: 1584502983
List Price: $49.95
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Avg Cusomer Rating: 5
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Summary: Much more than the fundamentals of SVG
The Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is an XML markup language for describing vector graphics, both static and animated. It is an open standard created by the World Wide Web Consortium, which is also responsible for standards like HTML and XHTML.
This book is one of the best I've found for people who want to do more than just make basic shapes and text with SVG. The book starts from the beginning, assuming nothing more than an elementary knowledge of math and a good understanding of XML. It first discusses what a minimal SVG documents consists of, the SVG coordinate system, and then uses a basic rectangle to demonstrate opacity, shadowing, the standard SVG colors, and gradients. Next the circle and ellipse constructs are introduced, as well as arc-based drawing and creating 3D effects. The SVG pattern element is introduced and is used to generate several effects in combination with drawing a checkerboard. Next the more complex topic of quadratic and cubic bezier curves is introduced. Both the mathematics and the SVG facilities required to draw them are discussed. The less known subjects of affine transformation in SVG are then covered. Included are the basic translate, rotate, scale, skew, and matrix functions. However, more complex effects are discussed in the context of these function calls when it is shown how to draw an hourglass and a cylinder in SVG. Next, the more artistic side of SVG is exposed with its various filter primitives that include Gaussian blur and turbulence effects. This is followed by discussions of text both plain and with effects, animation in SVG, and drawing various types of graphs and charts in SVG. To go further with SVG, it is shown how to use ECMAscript with SVG to provide interactivity and added mathematical sophistocation by writing your own effects. A CD is included with all of the source code, plus the code is downloadable from the book's website. I highly recommend this book as a complete guide to the use of SVG for anyone who already knows XML, some ECMAscript, and basic mathematics and matrix algebra. It is the best and most complete of its kind that I have found.
Amazon does not show the table of contents, so I do that next:
1 SVG Coordinate System, Simple Shapes, and Colors
2 Color Gradients and Style
3 Circles, Ellipses, and pathElements
4 SVG pattern, Grid Patterns, and clipPath
5 Quadratic and Cubic Bezier Curves
6 SVG Transformations
7 SVG Filters
8 Displaying Text
9 Simple SVG Animation
10 SVG for Bar Charts and Line Graphs
11 HTML, ECMAScript, and SVG DOM
12 Interactive SVG and ECMAScript
13 ECMAScript and SVG Animation
14 ECMAScript and Polar Equations
15 SVG and Pie Charts
16 ECMAScript, Recursion, and SVG
17 Generating SVG Documents
18 Supplemental Patterns
A. XSL Basics
B. Introduction to XML
C. Perl Basics
D. About the CD-ROM

Summary: Excellent SVG book for all skill levels
This is one of the best SVG books I've seen in a while. I think it is suited for all skill levels. The book makes good use of applying math to SVG. Whereas with other graphics tools you have to draw, the author shows how to use mathematical equations to create the images. Don't be intimidated--the math isn't that difficult<g>. The book also shows a lot of images in color--somewhat rare these days, esp. for technical books. The book comes with a CD that has tons of samples--you're sure to find something that piques your interest. If you want to get up to speed in SVG, buy this book!

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	SVG Programming: The Graphical Web Publisher: Apress Authors: Kurt Cagle
ISBN: 1590590198 List Price: $49.95 Amazon Price: $31.47 Usually ships in 4 to 7 weeks Buy this book from amazon.com or from amazon.co.uk	Avg Cusomer Rating: 5 Reviews: Summary: The best book on SVG so far This book is head and shoulders above the Eissenberg book (O'Reilly). Kurt Cagle is a serious developer, and the book shows it, with advanced examples that explore all aspects of programming. It would have been nice to have a .zip file that had all the examples in it, but that's a minor nit. Summary: SVG Bible for the Web Finally an SVG Bible for the Web. I have worked with SVG for just under 2 years and had to learn SVG from the W3C documents and lots of "experiments". I have only reviewed half of this book so far and found a wealth of knowledge on using SVG on the Web. It's examples are solid and well organized. This book can be used by the novice and the experienced to add the coolest vector graphics to their Website. This book is well balanced for all levels. It has earned a well respected slot next to my computer... Summary:

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SVG Essentials (O'Reilly XML)

Publisher: O'Reilly Media
Authors: J David Eisenberg

ISBN: 0596002238
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Avg Cusomer Rating: 4
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Summary: Good introduction, needs more recipes
The book provides a solid introduction to SVG through an increasingly complex set of examples of SVG use. It is well written and edited, it also provides a thorough description of the entirety of the standard. What it lacks is more depth in the area of recipes for commonly used image effects. It also needs more advice about how complex SVGs are organized and built for efficiency. I understand that SVG is still on the adoption curve, so perhaps we could see these improvements in a second version of the book when the standard has picked up a little more.

For the time being the book earns it's four stars by providing a nice learning curve and having high quality examples that demonstrates the concepts effectively.

Summary: Best ORA book since HTML: The Definitive Guide
While it's difficult to separate my excitement over SVG from the contents of this book, it's quite possible that the two are so directly related as to be inseperable. Within a few hours of buying this book, I was producing and printing extremely high quality images that I had found all but impossible to produce w/other technologies (JPEG codecs, etc.). If you are familiar with the basic mark-up language concepts, then you should have no trouble gleaning the essential elements of SVG.

After an excellent introductory chapter that provides a general overview, subsequent chapters cover aspects of SVG in detail, such as how to create basic shapes or generate text. One thing I particularly liked was that the author mostly uses a single example (SVG code to create a picture of a cat) to illustrate new concepts, creating a sense of cohesiveness that tied the chapters together. This book is *not* just a scattershot collection of essays that characterizes so many other technical books -- the text is clear, concise, and to the point. Finally, there is a very uselful appendix that summarizes the most frequently used attributes.

Perhaps the only drawback is that if you are coming to SVG from a non-technical background, you might find this book a little too gear-headed for your liking. For technical readers that want a thorough introduction (i.e., not a PhD thesis) to this exciting and useful technology, however, this book is a must.

Summary: Good starter book, but...
Not a bad book if you want to learn just the basics; however, I think you can easily find everything in this book on the Web if you take the time to dig around. If you're looking for a book to get you started, this one will do nicely. But if you're looking for more advanced/esoteric SVG material, I'd keep looking.

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Perl Graphics Programming

Publisher: O'Reilly Media
Authors: Shawn Wallace

ISBN: 059600219X
List Price: $39.95
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Summary: many supported formats
Wallace explains how Perl has evolved to have an impressive image reading and writing ability, for the most common graphics formats of GIF, JPEG, PNG and X bitmap. A lot of the heavy lifting has been done for you in two modules - GD and ImageMagick. The chapters on those expose you to simple subroutines that you'd expect in any graphics package.

But Wallace extends the scope to the usage of Postscript and PDF modules. Some Perl developers recognised the need to output in these formats, for compatibility with much professional documentation. So here too, you can take advantage of a lot of prior sweat.

For completeness, the book also has a section on supported vector graphics and animation. Specifically how to use SVG and Flash in Perl. This is perhaps a more specialised need than the previous modules. But good to have here, for some of you.

It should be noted that the book is not really about teaching graphics programming, per se. Wallace assumes you're already up on this. Rather, the book is about the modules and subroutines that give you the elementary graphics implementation vocabulary.

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	SVG Unleashed Publisher: Sams Authors: Andrew H. Watt Chris Lilley
ISBN: 0672324296 List Price: $49.99 Amazon Price: $35.97 Usually ships in 1 to 3 weeks Buy this book from amazon.com or from amazon.co.uk	Avg Cusomer Rating: 5 Reviews: Summary: Response to Justin Taylor's review 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. Summary: Just Plain Worthless First, a thought...Javascript and wireless web incompatibility. This book is full of it. Javascript was invented many years ago and is designed to run on the user's machine. This puts a load on the user's processor and for those with slower machines, the load is sometimes too much. Wireless phones don't support javascript and they most likely never will. SVG was created to be a high quality, small and highly compatible format for cell phones and other wireless devices. This book is full and I mean full of javascript to handle almost all of the web and appication solutions. Now another thought....XML. A new technology which was designed to be portable, compatible and server side, which means no trouble with the user's computers. regardless of how intimidating XML might seem, it is the future and needs to be addressed. SVG was designed to be used with XML and XML was designed for both web and application development. The focus on PHP, Perl and other scripting languages was given too little focus. Old information and technology does not constitute a good resource. This book was a poor example of the true power of SVG and will lead many new developers into the pitfall of using javascript which is doomed for extinction. Summary: Equips the reader with the practical knowledge 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 Summary:

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Sams Teach Yourself Svg in 24 Hours with CDROM

Publisher: Sams
Authors: Micah Laaker

ISBN: 0672322900
List Price: $29.99
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Summary: Teach yourself SVG - excellent choice for fast learning
I am currently working on a compiler that outputs SVG. 'Teach yourself SVG in 24 Hours' has enabled be to gain a good understanding of how to use some of the nice, handy features of SVG without having to spend ages geeking around on the internet looking for online tutorials!

It was a pleasent suprise to open a computing book that wasn't in too much jargon - quite a handy thing when its your first exposure to a new language. This book it written for everyone! (unless you have no interest in computers or the internet etc..)

Summary: The Best Computer Book I've Read
Teach Yourself SVG in 24 Hours, I believe, is one of the best computer books I've read. I am a computer savvy with 5 years experiences in programming and network administration as well as database management. Recently I am working on a project involving SVG.

This book walked you through a series of detailed tutorials to build a dynamic weather forecast web page using SVG step by step. In each chapter, a new topic is covered in an easy-to-understand and informative manner, which makes the learning curve pretty flat. As the title suggests, this book is an introductory primer to a new technique so it is not intented to delve too deep into a specific topic. However, a good many hyperlinks to W3C's online SVG specification appear here and there for your reference if you would like to make your hands dirtier...In a nutshelll, if you would like to teach yourself SVG from the beginning, it is The book, though it may, by a large chance, take you more than 24 hours to go through it.

Summary: Sams Teach Yourself SVG in 24 Hours
I am a graphic artist using Adobe Illustrator and I wanted to learn more about SVG. I asked the Adobe people about this file format that is included with the newest versions of Illustrator but was unable to find out much. Finally I found this great book.

This book begins with an overview and describes the justification and process of development of SVG. In chapter 2 it jumps right in and teaches the nuts and bolts of creating images with SVG. As I am not a coder or programmer, I was amazed at the simplicity. Once a few basics had been explained I was off and running. Anyone with even the most basic computer and a simple text editor can create sophisticated graphics.

Towards the end of the book is a section on using Adobe Illustrator and in the back there is a reference section for oddball color conversion. The book also comes with the Adobe Web Collection CD that includes the viewer and tryout versions of Illustrator and Photoshop.

I'm really excited by the potential of this technology and can recommend this book to anyone who wants to develop some expertise in a hurry.

Good Luck...Tom Burns

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	Online Mapping with SVG: Scalable Vector Graphics - Introduction (Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography) Publisher: Springer Authors: Andr� M. Winter Nicole Uebersch�r
ISBN: 3540367322 List Price: $139.00 Amazon Price: $139.00 Not yet published Buy this book from amazon.com or from amazon.co.uk	Avg Cusomer Rating: Reviews: Summary:

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