Shortly after World War I, Ford and GM created the large modern corporation, with its financial and statistical controls, mass production, and assembly lines. In the 1980s, Toyota stood out for combining quality with continuous refinement. Today, Google is reinventing business yet again-the way we work, how organizations are controlled, and how employees are managed.
Management consultant Bernard Girard has been analyzing Google since its founding in 1998, and now in The Google Way, he explores Google’s innovations in depth-many of which are far removed from the best practices taught at the top business schools.
As you read, you’ll see how much of Google’s success is due to its focus on users and automation. You’ll also learn how eCommerce has profoundly changed the relationship between businesses and their customers, for the first time giving customers an important role to play in a major corporation’s growth. Finally, Girard speculates about the limits of Google’s business model and discusses the challenges it will face as it continues to grow.
Google’s culture is one of innovation. Why not make that spirit of innovation your own?
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The audience for this book is beginning/novice web developers with a knowledge of HTML but not of JavaScript. The book begins with an introduction to basic JavaScript language features and then proceeds to work through a number of examples according to category (images, frames, browser windows, forms, regular expressions and strings, user events, and cookies). After, there are two chapters on AJAX fundamentals.
The book does not claim to be an in-depth resource. The general purpose of the QuickStart series of books is to provide an overview of the main concepts and practices in use by web developers today. It is meant to be a STARTING POINT to introduce novices to technologies, not as an in-depth reference. The authors of this and other QuickStart books point this out continually, yet still get bad reviews from people who have not taken the time to read about the purposes of various series from technical publishers. This is unfortunate for the public as well as unfair to the authors.
A previous reviewer mentioned what he took to be atrocious coverage of Ajax. The book contains two chapters exclusively covering Ajax. The first covers the fundamental techniques used to take advantage of this combination of technologies. The second chapter explores some of the popular Ajax toolkits currently available. This is consistent with the purpose of the book. Some readers may be interested in heading down the development path, yet others may be more interested in design and in using pre-existing tools. This book caters to both and has no intention of deceiving either reader.
The following quote is a good example of this. It is an excerpt from the title page of Chapter 16, which follows the introductory chapter (basic XMLHttpRequest usage, etc.) and precedes the Ajax toolkit chapter:
“[Writing] Ajax applications can be difficult. They often require a great deal of knowledge of working with the DOM, CSS, JavaScript, and server resources. Since this is a book for beginning scripters, we’ve shown you how to do some easy things with Ajax, so you can see that learning Ajax techniques is well within your reach. But many books have been written that are completely devoted to showing intermediate-to-advanced scripters how to create Ajax applications, and our Ajax chapters are no substitute for that kind of in-depth exploration.”
As for the dual-column formatting that some reviewers disliked, it is consistent with the formatting of the entire QuickStart series, as well as the QuickPro series of the same publisher. The format is nice for tackling specific techniques in a concise amount of space. It is not as abstractly engaging as conventional technical books, but it is not meant to be. The format is excellent for explaining techniques (especial design techniques) as well as for conveying a sense of quick forward momentum.
I’ve only recently started reading books from Peachpit Press, and I will turn to them before I turn anywhere else. I am a web developer who has been doing light programming for the last several years. I like these books because they get me up to speed quickly, and act as a comprehensive starting point, allowing me to understand “where I need to go from here.”
This book is excellent as a broad introduction with lots of real-world examples. If you’re a novice web developer with a decent grasp of HTML wishing for a comprehensive introduction to JavaScript and practical JavaScript techniques, this is the book for you.
However, if you’re well-grounded and are looking for more in-depth coverage of JavaScript and Ajax techniques, “Professional JavaScript for Web Developers” (Nicholas Zakas / Wrox Press) and “Professional Ajax” (Zakas, et. al. / Wrox Press) are excellent in-depth resources geared toward real-world professional development, and both are among the best peer-reviewed titles in existence on these subjects.
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Mirror
The HTML For Dummies and HTML 4 For Dummies books are a beginners guide to creating your own web pages from scratch. The books begin with the basic efforts of creating a HTML webpage, to creating and editing tables, horizontal lines. The book launches into Getting To Know HTML and XHTML to Formatting Web Pages with HTML - which shows you how to create your document structure, manipulate text, build ordered and unordered lists, and also covers linking to online resources using the anchor tags, and finally finding and using images. Chapters move on to Taking Precise Control Over Web Pages, where you can learn how to use and implement Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and get creative with colors and fonts, through to the use of Tables to create stunning webpages with great effect. Integrating Scripts with HTML covers various aspects of scripting webpages and delves into the nuts and bolts of using Javascript and forms to enhance the appeal and add greater functions to your web pages. The book also has a projects area which gives examples of About Me pages, and eBay auction page, a Company Website and a Product Catalog, then concludes with cool HTML tools, Ten HTML do’s and dont’s, and 10 ways to exterminate web page bugs. The books has several appendixes covering deprecated HTML elements and attributes and CSS properties.
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