Svg Essentials [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

SVG, a refactoring of several generations of Web technology and a public standard approved by the World Wide Web Consortium, can be authored without any special tools and without any special background, other than the immediately productive background provided by this book.

Eisenberg swiftly, but with diverting variety, illuminates the process of drawing, assembling shapes, creating textures, transforming coordinates, structuring documents, enriching text, creating reusable components, fine tuning color, animating shapes and colors and structures, creating lighting effects, and programming user interactions. All of this is built upon the simple SVG architecture: arrange your elements in a hierarchy and set their attributes.

There is an art to conveying important points without belaboring them and Eisenberg moves from example to example with perfect pitch.

The book also contains an eight page section with full color images.

Some people have complained about the lack of reference books on SVG. The SVG reference is in fact widely available, all 500+ pages of it, on the W3C site. What is really needed, and would have been useful in this or any SVG book, is a five page guide to using that reference -- how do I, in ten seconds or so, determine whether this element can be a child of that element, or if this element supports this attribute?

While I was developing SVG Composer the only book available was Watt's "Designing SVG Web Graphics" (another fine book with a rather different pitch). When Eisenberg's work came out I happily relearned SVG, doing every example and picking up any number of new tricks.

I do have some reservations: I didn't care for the cat drawing (hated it!) and the final two chapters on generating and serving SVG seemed aimed at the wrong audience (adepts at Java, servlets, and Perl) though the material itself is perfectly fine.

At first I had the same feeling about the appendices, which include brief samples of subjects from programming to fonts to matrix algebra, that surely Eisenberg was misjudging his audience. However he may have things just right -- SVG may well become the greatest crossover hit ever in computer languages, a lingua franca for logic and art.

SVG, a refactoring of several generations of Web technology and a public standard approved by the World Wide Web Consortium, can be authored without any special tools and without any special background, other than the immediately productive background provided by this book.

Eisenberg swiftly, but with diverting variety, illuminates the process of drawing, assembling shapes, creating textures, transforming coordinates, structuring documents, enriching text, creating reusable components, fine tuning color, animating shapes and colors and structures, creating lighting effects, and programming user interactions. All of this is built upon the simple SVG architecture: arrange your elements in a hierarchy and set their attributes.

There is an art to conveying important points without belaboring them and Eisenberg moves from example to example with perfect pitch.

The book also contains an eight page section with full color images.

Some people have complained about the lack of reference books on SVG. The SVG reference is in fact widely available, all 500+ pages of it, on the W3C site. What is really needed, and would have been useful in this or any SVG book, is a five page guide to using that reference -- how do I, in ten seconds or so, determine whether this element can be a child of that element, or if this element supports this attribute?

While I was developing SVG Composer the only book available was Watt's "Designing SVG Web Graphics" (another fine book with a rather different pitch).. When Eisenberg's work came out I happily relearned SVG, doing every example and picking up any number of new tricks.

I do have some reservations: I didn't care for the cat drawing (hated it!) and the final two chapters on generating and serving SVG seemed aimed at the wrong audience (adepts at Java, servlets, and Perl) though the material itself is perfectly fine.

At first I had the same feeling about the appendices, which include brief samples of subjects from programming to fonts to matrix algebra, that surely Eisenberg was misjudging his audience. However he may have things just right -- SVG may well become the greatest crossover hit ever in computer languages, a lingua franca for logic and art.

For the time being the book earns it's four stars by providing a nice learning curve and having high quality examples that demonstrates the concepts effectively.