“RAD With Mozilla: I Finished the Book”

I've finally finished reading the book (Rapid Application Development with Mozilla) and have completed the code. Now I just need to write up the errata for the last two chapters. No small undertaking, as chapter 16 was such a mess. It might be easier to mark up the parts that are right.

I apologize for the sarcasm. I've tried to be very nice about all the mistakes in this book, excusing them as best I can with "at least he wrote it" and "it's better than not having the book at all," but I have to say that this is the worst job of editing I've ever seen. I honestly believe all they did was run it through a spell checker.

When Matt Neuburg wrote Frontier: The Definitive Guide, I was one of the reviewers who helped weed out the troublespots before the book was printed. (I mention that only to show that I'm not totally unfamiliar with the process.) Had something similar been done before this book was published, it would be a very different book, and my much-too-popular list of errata never would have been published.

I spent at least as much time trying to figure out what was wrong as I did reading the book and working on the Hands On sections. Made me a little grumpy, apparently, but it's time to be frank: this book needs a serious update, perhaps a complete rewrite.

I do have one good thing to say about all of the mistakes: they forced me to investigate the platform more deeply, so in the end I learned more than I would have if I had read a more accurate tutorial.

Oh, one other thing: what's up with all of the reviewers who talked about what a great book this is? And what about the Mozillazine survey that rated this as the best book on XUL? Isn't accuracy just as important as readability and approachability? Am I the only person who has read the whole thing cover to cover?!?

I repeat: this is a well-written book that was very badly edited, if it was edited at all. If you need to learn XUL, then it's a good place to start as long as you keep the page of errata close at hand.