Webmastering for Dummies drives home to its readers that Webmastering is not just about knowing HTML and being familiar with some graphics software. Though it's fast retreating from the bleeding edge it once occupied, Webmastering is one of the last jack-of-all-trades job descriptions. A good Webmaster has to know something (quite a bit, actually) about computer networking, telephone services, software, database design and administration, user administration, electronic money transactions, and tons more. This book doesn't go into much detail on any aspect of the job of the Webmaster--particularly the more-or-less autonomous kind that doesn't function as part of a larger corporate information-technology group--but it provides a good overview of the job, and a moderate amount of valuable information. You'll probably want to read this book, or at least its individual chapters, straight through in the way you would read a novel. The plot here isn't much, but the authors like to describe their subjects in English, rather than with code examples or protocols you can follow on a keyboard. It's good reading, though it's sometimes muddled by digressions into Web sites with excessive design budgets. People with budgets like that aren't going to be reading Dummies books to figure out how to set up their sites. You won't be disappointed if you're starting from zero, but expect to do further research. --David Wall Topics covered: the varied skills that are part of the Webmaster's trade, including goals assessment, content accumulation, e-commerce engineering, service-provider interaction and coding with HTML.

A programming cookbook is usually a collection of small (but perfectly formed and debugged) components you can mix and match to create your own applications. By this definition, Javascript Application Cookbook is a misnomer. This is actually a collection of 11 completely worked-out client-side Javascript applications including a search engine, Web based tests, slideshow, simple ciphers, shopping cart and so on--all useful stuff.It assumes the reader has a good grounding in Javascript--certainly enough to follow the code. The explanations that follow each application are mainly high-level overviews of the operation of the component parts of each application.If you want to learn Javascript, you might be better off with a book on the Javascript language and a standard reference on programming algorithms. Jerry Bradenhaugh clearly knows his stuff, however, and if you need a lot of examples showing effective ways to construct large client-side Javascript applications then the Javascript Application Cookbook will be useful. --Steve Patient

Today's Webmasters must be literate in a number of different--and ever-evolving--languages and technologies. Webmaster in a Nutshell is meant as a tool for dealing with this demanding requirement. Although this title leans a bit toward freeware tools, it offers plenty of universal information as well.This guide briefly tours the Web and covers basic HTML, tables, forms and frames in a series of quick reads. (This discussion offers just enough information to jog the memory to proper HTML usage.) You get in-depth coverage of cascading style sheets (CSS), the Extensible Markup Language (XML), JavaScript, HTTP, CGI and Perl. Stephen Spainhour and Robert Eckstein explore CSS in brief but do cover the pending W3C standard. They also provide a refreshingly quick overview of XML. To present JavaScript, the book makes excellent use of diagrams to illustrate the object hierarchy and the way the language works with windows and frames.Webmaster takes on a decidedly public-domain slant in its presentation of server configuration, primarily aimed at the freeware Apache server, and PHP, the freeware server-side scripting language. Even if you don't code with these tools, however, this book offers plenty of industry-standard reference. --Stephen Plain