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1. Beginning HTML, XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript
An indispensable introductory guide to creating web pages using the most up-to-date standards
This beginner guide shows you how to use XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript to create compelling Web sites. While learning these technologies, you will discover coding practices such as writing code that works on multiple browsers including mobile devices, how to use AJAX frameworks to add interactivity to your pages, and how to ensure your pages meet accessible requirements.
Packed with real-world examples, the book not only teaches you how to write Web sites using XHTML, CSS and JavaScript, but it also teaches you design principles that help you create attractive web sites and practical advice on how to make web pages more usable. In addition, special checklists and appendices review key topics and provide helpful references that re-enforce the basics you've learned.
- Serves as an ideal beginners guide to writing web pages using XHTML
- Explains how to use CSS to make pages more appealing and add interactivity to pages using JavaScript and AJAX frameworks
- Share advice on design principles and how to make pages more attractive and offers practical help with usability and accessibility
- Features checklists and appendices that review key topics
This introductory guide is essential reading for getting started with using XHTML, CSS and JavaScript to create exciting and compelling Web sites.
Note: CD-ROM/DVD and other supplementary materials are not included as part of eBook file.
2. Building Android Apps with HTML,CSS,and JavaScript
If you know HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, you already have the tools you need to develop Android applications. Now updated for HTML5, the second edition of this hands-on guide shows you how to use open source web standards to design and build apps that can be adapted for any Android device.
You’ll learn how to create an Android-friendly web app on the platform of your choice, and then use Adobe’s free PhoneGap framework to convert it to a native Android app. Discover why device-agnostic mobile apps are the wave of the future, and start building apps that offer greater flexibility and a much broader reach.
- Convert a website into a web application, complete with progress indicators and other features
- Add animation with JQTouch to make your web app look and feel like a native Android app
- Make use of client-side data storage with apps that run when the Android device is offline
- Use PhoneGap to hook into advanced Android features, including the accelerometer, geolocation, and alerts
- Test and debug your app on the Web with real users, and submit the finished product to the Android Market
3. Hackers
This 25th anniversary edition of Steven Levy's classic book traces the exploits of the computer revolution's original hackers -- those brilliant and eccentric nerds from the late 1950s through the early '80s who took risks, bent the rules, and pushed the world in a radical new direction. With updated material from noteworthy hackers such as Bill Gates, Mark Zukerberg, Richard Stallman, and Steve Wozniak, Hackers is a fascinating story that begins in early computer research labs and leads to the first home computers.
Levy profiles the imaginative brainiacs who found clever and unorthodox solutions to computer engineering problems. They had a shared sense of values, known as "the hacker ethic," that still thrives today. Hackers captures a seminal period in recent history when underground activities blazed a trail for today's digital world, from MIT students finagling access to clunky computer-card machines to the DIY culture that spawned the Altair and the Apple II.
Amazon.com Exclusive: The Rant Heard Round the World
By Steven Levy
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But when I revisited the book recently to prepare the 25th Anniversary Edition of my first book, it was clear that I had luckily stumbled on the origin of a computer (and Internet) related controversy that still permeates the digital discussion. Throughout the book I write about something I called The Hacker Ethic, my interpretation of several principles implicitly shared by true hackers, no matter whether they were among the early pioneers from MIT’s Tech Model Railroad Club (the Mesopotamia of hacker culture), the hardware hackers of Silicon Valley’s Homebrew Computer Club (who invented the PC industry), or the slick kid programmers of commercial game software. One of those principles was “Information Should Be Free.” This wasn’t a justification of stealing, but an expression of the yearning to know more so one could hack more. The programs that early MIT hackers wrote for big computers were stored on paper tapes. The hackers would keep the tapes in a drawer by the computer so anyone could run the program, change it, and then cut a new tape for the next person to improve. The idea of ownership was alien.
This idea came under stress with the advent of personal computers. The Homebrew Club was made of fanatic engineers, along with a few social activists who were thrilled at the democratic possibilities of PCs. The first home computer they could get their hands on was 1975’s Altair, which came in a kit that required a fairly hairy assembly process. (Its inventor was Ed Roberts, an underappreciated pioneer who died earlier this year.) No software came with it. So it was a big deal when 19-year-old Harvard undergrad Bill Gates and his partner Paul Allen wrote a BASIC computer language for it. The Homebrew people were delighted with Altair BASIC, but unhappy that Gates and Allen charged real money for it. Some Homebrew people felt that their need for it outweighed their ability to pay. And after one of them got hold of a “borrowed” tape with the program, he showed up at a meeting with a box of copies (because it is so easy to make perfect copies in the digital age), and proceeded to distribute them to anyone who wanted one, gratis.
This didn’t sit well with Bill Gates, who wrote what was to become a famous “Letter to Hobbyists,” basically accusing them of stealing his property. It was the computer-age equivalent to Luther posting the Ninety-Five Theses on the Castle Church. Gate’s complaints would reverberate well into the Internet age, and variations on the controversy persist. Years later, when another undergrad named Shawn Fanning wrote a program called Napster that kicked off massive piracy of song files over the Internet, we saw a bloodier replay of the flap. Today, issues of cost, copying and control still rage--note Viacom’s continuing lawsuit against YouTube and Google. And in my own business—journalism--availability of free news is threatening more traditional, expensive new-gathering. Related issues that also spring from controversies in Hackers are debates over the “walled gardens” of Facebook and Apple’s iPad.
I ended the original Hackers with a portrait of Richard Stallman, an MIT hacker dedicated to the principle of free software. I recently revisited him while gathering new material for the 25th Anniversary Edition of Hackers, he was more hard core than ever. He even eschewed the Open Source movement for being insufficiently noncommercial.
When I spoke to Gates for the update, I asked him about his 1976 letter and the subsequent intellectual property wars. “Don’t call it war,” he said. “Thank God we have an incentive system. Striking the right balance of how this should work, you know, there's going to be tons of exploration.” Then he applied the controversy to my own situation as a journalism. “Things are in a crazy way for music and movies and books,” he said. “Maybe magazine writers will still get paid 20 years from now. Who knows? Maybe you'll have to cut hair during the day and just write articles at night.”
So Amazon.com readers, it’s up to you. Those who have not read Hackers,, have fun and be amazed at the tales of those who changed the world and had a hell of time doing it. Those who have previously read and loved Hackers, replace your beat-up copies, or the ones you loaned out and never got back, with this beautiful 25th Anniversary Edition from O’Reilly with new material about my subsequent visits with Gates, Stallman, and younger hacker figures like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. If you don’t I may have to buy a scissors--and the next bad haircut could be yours!