Fundamentals of SVG Programming: Concepts to Source Code (Charles River Media Graphics) [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

This is one of the best SVG books I've seen in a while. I think it is suited for all skill levels. The book makes good use of applying math to SVG. Whereas with other graphics tools you have to draw, the author shows how to use mathematical equations to create the images. Don't be intimidated--the math isn't that difficult<g>. The book also shows a lot of images in color--somewhat rare these days, esp. for technical books. The book comes with a CD that has tons of samples--you're sure to find something that piques your interest. If you want to get up to speed in SVG, buy this book!

The Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is an XML markup language for describing vector graphics, both static and animated. It is an open standard created by the World Wide Web Consortium, which is also responsible for standards like HTML and XHTML.

This book is one of the best I've found for people who want to do more than just make basic shapes and text with SVG. The book starts from the beginning, assuming nothing more than an elementary knowledge of math and a good understanding of XML. It first discusses what a minimal SVG documents consists of, the SVG coordinate system, and then uses a basic rectangle to demonstrate opacity, shadowing, the standard SVG colors, and gradients. Next the circle and ellipse constructs are introduced, as well as arc-based drawing and creating 3D effects. The SVG pattern element is introduced and is used to generate several effects in combination with drawing a checkerboard. Next the more complex topic of quadratic and cubic bezier curves is introduced. Both the mathematics and the SVG facilities required to draw them are discussed. The less known subjects of affine transformation in SVG are then covered. Included are the basic translate, rotate, scale, skew, and matrix functions. However, more complex effects are discussed in the context of these function calls when it is shown how to draw an hourglass and a cylinder in SVG. Next, the more artistic side of SVG is exposed with its various filter primitives that include Gaussian blur and turbulence effects. This is followed by discussions of text both plain and with effects, animation in SVG, and drawing various types of graphs and charts in SVG. To go further with SVG, it is shown how to use ECMAscript with SVG to provide interactivity and added mathematical sophistocation by writing your own effects. A CD is included with all of the source code, plus the code is downloadable from the book's website. I highly recommend this book as a complete guide to the use of SVG for anyone who already knows XML, some ECMAscript, and basic mathematics and matrix algebra. It is the best and most complete of its kind that I have found.

Amazon does not show the table of contents, so I do that next:

1 SVG Coordinate System, Simple Shapes, and Colors

2 Color Gradients and Style

3 Circles, Ellipses, and pathElements

4 SVG pattern, Grid Patterns, and clipPath

5 Quadratic and Cubic Bezier Curves

6 SVG Transformations

7 SVG Filters

8 Displaying Text

9 Simple SVG Animation

10 SVG for Bar Charts and Line Graphs

11 HTML, ECMAScript, and SVG DOM

12 Interactive SVG and ECMAScript

13 ECMAScript and SVG Animation

14 ECMAScript and Polar Equations

15 SVG and Pie Charts

16 ECMAScript, Recursion, and SVG

17 Generating SVG Documents

18 Supplemental Patterns

A. XSL Basics

B. Introduction to XML

C. Perl Basics

D. About the CD-ROM

I agree wholeheartedly with the other reviewer who found this book lacking in explanations. What this book (and the accompanying CD) has is lots and lots of svg files. For getting a 'feel' for svg and what it can do all of this code is useful. As a tutorial and guide for learning svg, however, this book is sorely lacking. First, it lacks any sort of 'overview' of the svg language. It would be nice if this book had a quick reference listing of all of the svg elements and the attributes allowed for each and a page number referencing where that element/attribute is discussed. What the book does instead is jump right into code examples, seemingly wandering at random throughout the svg spec. For example, chapter 7 discusses a handful of svg filters. In the feTurbulence example the attribute "numOctaves" suddenly appears. What's that? What is the valid range of 'numOctave' parameters? Can I use it with the other filter elements? What does it *do*? Is 'numOctaves' in the index? Nope. And that's pretty much the story throughout the whole book. Another example: almost all of the code samples use the 'g' group element. It's first introduced on page 6 as 'The fifth line contains the 'g' element', followed a paragraph later with 'You can use the svg g element to enclose a group of components that are logically related and need to be treated as a single unit.' The g element is used in almost all of the code samples, sometimes with certain attributes like 'id' and sometimes without. So g must be a fairly important tag, right? Is 'g' in the index? Nope. 'Group'? Nope. Is there any page I can find that explains what attributes are available with the <g> tag and how and when I should use them? Nope. There are five sizeable chapters devoted to ECMAscript and svg. There is *one* entry under J in the index, and that entry is '.js'. The page it refers to talks about placing svg code in .js files to sorta protect it from being viewed. If you didn't bother to read the introduction and weren't up to date with your web mastery you'd have no clue ECMAscript is simply the 'international name' for Javascript. Jeez.

BTW, svg is still very much a 'work in progress' as far as implementation support goes. On my Gentoo Linux system I can use Apache Batik to view most of the non-animated svg code examples. I have to use the Adobe svg viewer in Firefox to see the animations. (The built-in Firefox svg viewer won't display most of the code samples because of a missing namespace declaration in the svg tags.) A lot of the code samples in this book look nice but support among the various browsers seems patchy at best.