if by "novice" you mean "the lobotomized" and by "professional" you mean "won't have to ride the short bus next year"

Don't get this book if you have _any_ experience in programming or have little patience for repetition or word count padding. I suffered through the whole thing just so I could feel justified in writing this review.

"HTML elements are not available to the server, because they are text that is passed through to the browser." O.M.G. How did I go all this time without realizing that HTML is text that is "passed through" to the browser?! Sentences like this one are commonplace: "The HTML section of the Toolbox will have a title of HTML." Ya think? Or this jem: "The last category of properties is Misc. This category will list any properties that did not fit into the other categories." The whole book is like this. It's incredible. I didn't pad my jr. high english papers like this.

Finally, there are some mistakes in the references to the samples -- having you name a class something, then referring to that class with a different name later. This type of errata is common in tech books, but with something this short and brutally simple-minded, you would have thought the tech editor would have caught these mistakes. Maybe he fell asleep reading it as many times as I did.

Other Reviews

• if by "novice" you mean "the lobotomized" and by "professional" you mean "won't have to ride the short bus next year"
• OOP concepts are clearly explained
• Good introduction to object oriented programming!
• Emphasis on the 'Beginning'