Complete Text 'Rapid Application Development with Mozilla' Available for Free DownloadMonday April 12th, 2004Wily Yuen writes: "Nigel McFarlane's Rapid Application Development with Mozilla is now available as a PDF download from Bruce Perens' Open Source series at InformIT. Please support the author and buy the book if you find it to be useful." Displaying a keen sense of irony, InformIT have ensured that their download page does not work in Mozilla. The book is available as a zip file containing a collection of PDFs or as a zip file containing a collection of RTF documents. 'Displaying a keen sense of irony, InformIT have ensured that their download page does not work in Mozilla.' userContent.css to the rescue (with a little help from a small extension) offending css is : #contentPromotions #promotionFooter {margin-top:30px; padding:0; position:relative;} fix (w/o URI id) #contentPromotions #promotionFooter { position: auto ! important; /* or static */ } fix (using URI id - since this makes it specific to informit.com pages) #www-informit-com #contentPromotions #promotionFooter { position: auto ! important; /* or static */ } URI id : http://downloads.mozdev.org/cdn/uriid/uriid.xpi Wow, not testing that page in Mozilla shows a particular lack of forsight on the part of the publishers. Know thy audience and so on. In case anyone's interested, it looks like Nigel and fantasai are heading up the DevMo effort to produce a 'portal' for Mozilla developer resources and hopefully to extend the breadth of documentation available. I know that I'm talking without acting, but it would be great if the people who develop Firefox extensions could pool their collective knowledge and make it avaliable in a more formal format than the question - response forum system. Maybe some kind of Wiki setup would work? Even if the site is inexplicably coded to be invisible to Mozilla, it's still a very nice gesture to distribute the book for free. Thanks to everyone involved! I've been reading this book over Easter, and I can say without hesitation that this is the book that the Mozilla Platform has needed - Mozilla's Camel Book. It's well-written, honest, covers the entire subject well and is packed with useful info. Full marks to Nigel - I hope it sells as well as it deserves. Gerv Indeed, I have browsed over the book in Easter too. Nigel's writing is easy to understand, and he's pretty clear of his goal and scope in his writings. We need more docs like this one in order to push Mozilla as a platform and help the GNOME XUL integration vision as discussed few days ago. using firefox i can completely disable css and get a nice clean page and retrieve the info i want. I can not even ping it.. has anyone mirrored the docs? http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=4584#83 I downloaded it a few days ago in response to the above post. The page worked fine at that time. Yes, it was working few days ago. It isn't clear what prompted the changes. Another workaround is to save the page as HTML in your local harddrive, access the local HTML file, and there you go for the links to download various PDF and source of open content documentation. If anyone is interested in more books about XUL and friends, see the Open XUL Alliance bookshelf online @ http://xul.sourceforge.net/books.html Please note that in geraldb's context XUL really means any XML language used to produce user interfaces (NOT just XUL(TM) from Mozilla). He isn't referring specifically to the syntax/grammar of the XUL(TM) we all know and love that is defined by Mozilla/Mozilla Foundation/mozilla.org/etc. (Some of what he mentions is indeed specifically related to XUL(TM), but some also isn't. For example, Flex and XUL(TM) are hardly related except that each uses XML for its basic syntax, while the grammars are very different.) Isn't the book name clear enough, sir? People who has a brain can tell this book is for developing Mozilla and its XUL. Please take your name-calling war elsewhere. Don't spam my site or I'll be forced to turn off your account. jason > Don't spam my site or I'll be forced to turn off your account. I hope you don't mean my post. If you do, please turn off my account. If there's anyone who has promoted Nigel's Mozilla XUL book more than I do (besides Nigel of course) please let me know. I thought this is what this news posting is about: promoting this book. Also, Mozdev.org Doc section has already updated with a link to this book since yesterday. And I personally posted the news about it at Mozilla Developement and XUL Planet forum. anyway, here's the direct link: http://www.informit.com/content/downloads/perens/0131423436_pdf.zip I can not reach their sites (www.informit.com and phptr.com) in any way - not with browser neither with wget or even ping. So I ask those of you who was lucky enough to download this piece of XUL wisdom to help me read it too. Please put to some site or send me via email -- ilishin [at] zeos [dot] net Thanks for that great book and thanks informit for releasing this Thank you all for your comments about InformIT's CSS problems. The problem is ironic, but we are taking it very seriously. As soon as we learned of the problem, our developers went to work to correct it, and a new build will be released tonight (4/15/04) that will allow Mozilla users to view the Bruce Perens' pages on InformIT.com. Our site is tested for compatibility under all major (and several minor) browsers, and Mozilla is included in that mix. However, we released some new code last weekend that wasn't tested thoroughly enough. For that we apologize, and we'll try not to let it happen again (those needing floggings have been flogged). Some people commented on not being able to access the site at all, and for that I have no explanation. We have had no downtime events, and despite the CSS problems, our site has been running without interruption. There was one bad link listed in the original post above, so let me provide you all with a correct link (a redirect) and the direct link to the Bruce Perens' Open Source Series page: http://www.phptr.com/perens (this link is a redirect to...) http://www.informit.com/promotion/1041 Hopefully if you try either of those links on 4/16, you will have no problems with the pages in Mozilla. If you have any other comments, please feel free to contact us at editors@informit.com. Thanks for your patience, Dustin Sullivan InformIT.com |