SVG Essentials

Hunting around for a web-tutorial, most did not describe stylesheets and grouping well (and that's hardly advanced, I'd say it is essential after the basic shapes.This book is now a decade old, but it's still valid - more so, as most browsers now support svg (apart from internet explorer before v9, i.e. on Windows XP). A new edition would be very welcome - luckily for the author, such a version could be mainly extending the breadth of the book (into animation) as the fundamentals have not changed or become outdated.Note this book is available on O'Reilly's commons website (google svg essentials wikicontent). I bought a used copy for a few quid as nice to have a bound copy.Internet Explorer lack of support for SVG until version 9 is no doubt the reason for the lack of popularity of SVG (though there are workarounds). Maybe in a year or two (2014?) SVG will finally become mainstream - when Windows XP no longer common, and therefore we can rely on IE9 being the base level browser. IE8 has no support for SVG, and that's hampered SVG considerably. Once we no longer have to support IE8, SVG will be useful from website decorations, backgrounds, through to complex menu systems and drawing web-apps. The future looks great for SVG!

I can't believe I missed this formidable tech for so long! This edition might be twenty-odd years old, but between this well-structured volume and the interweb, a great introduction and reference. Great value too.

This book is great for people (like me) who've grasped the idea of SVG from an introductory chapter in a general XML book, but want to get to grips with the detail of the language.Where it really scores is with practical examples of things you can do with SVG, particularly sripting it.

While this is a very good as an introduction, it is not very thorough, particularly with more advanced topics such as animation and scripting where browsers are still a minefield. A new edition is needed.

I found this book very easy to read and not too hard to keep up with. The information is spread out through the chapters well. I started reading and testing the examples on the PC. But after chapter 5 I decided to just read the book all the way through first and then read through it and testing the examples on the PC. This is a great book if you want to learn about SVG.

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is an XML language for specifying object-based graphics. "SVG Essentials" provides an excellent introduction to the language as well as a wealth of reference information.The book starts off with a simple introduction to SVG by drawing a rather simple cat. Okay, so it looks like a five-year-old's drawing, but this isn't a problem. Other texts start off with some incredible masterpiece which you would never be able to produce yourself; this one starts off with a clear, to the point, simple image which can easily be understood. The rest of the graphics are the same -- rather than attempting to dazzle the reader with eye candy, the author provides useful graphics of the kind you are likely to create yourself.The sections on shapes and gradients are equally down to earth and useful. All examples are well selected, and are not put in purely for the drool factor. The effects section should probably be longer -- the W3C specification contains a wealth of mathematics and very little useful description.The second half of the book covers animated SVG, converting to and from SVG and serving SVG from Apache. The code here is more in-depth and less suited for beginners, but for people familiar with the basics of dynamic content generation it should be helpful.The book assumes that the reader is familiar with XML, although an appendix provides a very brief introduction to the language. Readers with no knowledge of SGML or XML may find another text on one of these languages useful as a companion.

This book provides a beginner's introduction to SVG and in this respect is more than adequate. For those familar with the W3C documentation (TR, notes etc.) you will find further detailed information once you have finished this book (or indeed as a worthy alternative to it).In spite of it's claim to be an "essentials only" book my main reservation about it is that it is not presented sufficiently in the context of other XML technologies. For example, one significant feature of SVG is its interoperability with XSL (e.g. embedding images in PDF documents using XSL-FO etc.). Such examples are simple to demonstrate and make more apparent why SVG should be of interest to developers rather than present it as yet another image generation technology.The author has missed several good opportunities here that I hope will be addressed in a future edition of the book!

So far, this book is easy to understand and explains SVG exactly the way I need to read it to understand SVG better. I have several O'Reilly books, and this one is as good as the others. I also like that there are alot of more advanced sections and it isn't boring, yet doesn't advance too quickly. I hate when books suddenly leave me wondering if I missed a section because they advance too abruptly. This one doesn't.

Article reçu en 2 ou 3 jours, et en très bon état. C'est très appréciable.Ce livre m'est utile pour mon travail et je l'utilise beaucoup.

Traite beaucoup de paramètres du langage, mais pas assez d'exemples à mon gout. Le lien avec les pages html gagnerait à être plus étoffé.

Decent fundamentals. Would love short book with modern applications, i.e. Fast Websites book(s)

The title pretty much sums it up. This is "Essential SVG"; it isn't "SVG; The Definitive Guide" which sadly hasn't been written yet. There's not a lot of meat on the bone here, with topics covered superficially, leaving out a great deal of needed detail. Fortunately, such detail is easy to find on the web, but the lack of it here, along with a lack of tutorial material, makes me wonder what the value of this book really is.Many of the examples don't work, or only work in some browsers but not others; like so much else, the topic of browser support is simply ignored. At least a couple of the example illustrations don't match the code examples shown.The index is simply atrocious. Keyword after keyword is completely absent, and much of what is listed points to the wrong page, or is useless cruft produced by an obviously misguided auto-indexing tool of some sort. If you need to find something fast, you'll be reaching for your favorite search engine in frustration, because you won't find it here.If you're just getting started with SVG, this slim volume may be helpful for the first week or so. Then, you'll be pining for a true, comprehensive guide to SVG.