The 2nd edition was 208 pages, and the 3rd edition is 304 pages, so there's about 100 pages of entirely new material. Another 100 pages were heavily revised to work with the current browsers, and to better explain issues that weren't completely covered in the 2nd edition. We also incorporated many of the excellent suggestions we got from the readers of the 2nd edition, to whom we are indebted.
Yes, and it's finally here! You can download the zipped file with all the scripts and images by going to the scripts link and clicking on "download all the scripts and images as a single zipped file here. " Of course, you can still copy & paste individual scripts, too.
There are three cases where we haven't made scripts available for download:
Between teaching and working on our next book, we're not taking on any consulting projects at this time. Thanks for asking, though.
No. If we did, we would never have time to write our next books. And you wouldn't learn as much.
Sorry, no. Go talk to the author of the other book.
Again, we can't, because we get so much mail that we would never get new work done. We can recommend a really good HTML book, though; it's HTML 4 for the World Wide Web, 4th Edition, by our friend Elizabeth Castro. Clicking that link and buying that book from Amazon makes both us and Liz happy. Special note for the cat fancier: our cat Pixel is prominently featured on Page 109.
Sure you can. We just can't promise to answer individual questions, because of the time it takes. We will put frequently asked questions (and their answers!) here on this page as they come in.
Not in this brave new world of viruses being spread with email attachments. We've already been sent viruses by accident (or at least, they said it was an accident); we don't want any more. So we never open any files sent to us by people we don't know. Instead, you should post your pages on the Web, then send us the URL so we can take a look at the problem. We trust you, of course; it's the other guys that made us come up with this rule.
Most of the questions we get have to do with image manipulation: rollovers, banners, etc. It's difficult to debug scripts that involve images without having the images available, as quite often, the problem has to do with the way the images are referenced (e.g., directory structure issues, proper capitalization issues). So again, please, send us a URL of the problem page, and we'll be happy to take a look at it.
Actually, those scripts work just fine in IE... when they're put on the web. There's a problem in IE where they don't work when run from your local hard drive. And unfortunately, that's an IE bug, and not one that we can fix. Given, though, that once you upload it to your site they all work fine, it hasn't actually inconvenienced anyone.
We thought it was pretty straightforward to find it on MS's site, so we left the URL out of the book, as Microsoft changes their site layout from time to time. However, we've received this question a number of times, so we guess it's not as easy as we thought.
The home page for Windows Script Technologies is at http://www.msdn.microsoft.com/scripting. Once you go there, you'll see "Script Debugger" as a choice in the left-hand navigation bar. This site is worth bookmarking; you can find lots of useful information there about JScript if you poke around.
We can't find it either. On page 165, we state that "you can't use cookies to tell all users how many times the page has been hit." We're not sure where the reviewer got his information, as you can't do this with JavaScript. Sorry!
We're not sure where the reviewer got that from, either. About half the screenshots show Netscape and about half show Internet Explorer. Of course, the chapter on DHTML is primarily IE for Windows, because it has the most capabilities. Personally, we use both platforms & browsers, depending on what we're doing. Tom primarily uses his PC when he's writing (due to its speech recognition capabilities) while Dori primarily uses her Mac for coding (because she likes BBEdit). Browser-wise, both of us prefer to use Internet Explorer on both platforms because it has better capabilities, but we have high hopes for Mozilla.
The reviewer may have thought that the book was Mac & Netscape biased just because the scripts were tested on both (unlike a number of its competitors), along with everything else we could try to throw at them. Every script in the book was tested in various versions of IE, Netscape, and Opera, running under Windows 95, 98, NT, MacOS, and Linux. Many thanks to our great beta testers!
If you use the code from our book, we're happy to help you. However, if you use the code from our book and ask Macromedia or Adobe for help, they'll require you to start using their products first.
We have to ask the same thing. If you have a problem with an Adobe product, please contact Adobe. If you have a problem with a Macromedia product, please contact Macromedia. And if you have a problem with our code, please contact us. But the two of us can't afford to give multi-million dollar software companies free support for their products.
You also might consider purchasing one of these books: GoLive VQS, GoLive Bible, Dreamweaver VQS, or Dreamweaver Bible.
Those are just example names for CGIs--it's literally "some action"; any action that you want it to be. We don't actually have any CGIs, as they're not required to test or use the JavaScript scripts in that chapter. If you want to learn to write CGI's, we recommend Elizabeth Castro's book Perl and CGI for the World Wide Web: Visual QuickStart Guide.
We've had a lot of error reports about these scripts, but they all seem to be covered by the caveats in this book. If you have trouble, please make sure that: