Official SWiSHmax Bible — Donna L. Baker
Rating: 3.5/5
The strange intersection of computer science and book publishing has a few peculiar rules that often make it difficult to find quality works. The usual truism that you should never judge a book by its cover is, of course, applicable, but there are a couple other things to bear in mind when looking at a computer reference work.
First off, quantity is not quality. Some of the thickest computer books are also some of the worst. I can’t count how many really, really bad SQL references I’ve seen that are just phenomenally massive. C and C++ training books also often fall under this statement. You’d think some of these authors were paid by the pound.
Second, the more authoritative a title sounds, the more I mistrust the content. If the content doesn’t speak for itself, the author and publisher often try to make the title do the job.
Third, books that purport to be written for complete idiots are usually as good as their word.
Fourth, the more popular the subject the worse your luck in finding a good book. Sturgeon’s Law (90 percent of everything is crap) is your friend here. I believe this is because popular subjects mean lots of demand for books on the topic, which means publishing contracts are easier to come by. More obscure subjects require a harder sell and publishers likely don’t feel such a strong need to push something substandard out the door.
Fifth, if the book gives you a timeframe that you’ll master the material within, you won’t. What you’ll usually get is a dog and pony show, not a useful reference for skills.
Finally, the more acronyms plastered over the front of the book, the more dubious I get. If a book covers one topic well, I’m satisfied (actually, I’m usually thrilled). Trying to explain how to integrate five or six TLA technologies together just means the book won’t cover anything well.
One of the best computer books I’ve ever read was Modern C++ Design by Andrei Alexandrescu. A thin, modest, unprepossessing book, Modern C++ Design is just fantastic as an education into the power available through the C++ language in light of the advent of Standard C++.
So how does Official SWiSHmax Bible stack up? Fairly well, actually.
Granted, it likens itself to the Bible. I’d say there’s a bit of hubris there. The cover mentions PHP and XML, but the primary focus is obviously SWiSHmax, so that’s good. There’s no timeframe to mastery, nor is there a mention of morons or idiots or fools on the cover. So far, so good.
The book is a bit over-bulky. It spends at least a third of its 600+ pages detailing how to draw simple geometric shapes and text in the SWiSHmax IDE. Although there were some useful tips and tricks included in these sections, it could have been pared way down and still easily conveyed everything required. Another 200 or so pages was spent on animations, effects and scripting. This was somewhat of a mixed bag. These topics are a central focus of the whole SWiSHmax tool, so that amount of space was probably justified, but I still think that better writing and editing could have eliminated some bloat there as well.
It disappointed me that they devoted only 15 pages to explaining the SWiSHscript scripting language. This powerful tool is flat out required to do any advanced work, and it would have been nice to have a concise yet full reference chapter on the language and its idioms. I expected to find an appendix with a more advanced treatment of SWiSHscript, but apparently the 15-page chapter and the many “learn by doing” examples later in the text were all we get.
The last section of the book is where the real value is. There are several chapters written by “guest authors”, each of whom presents a sample SWiSHmax application. These applications range from a web site template to a web storefront with shopping cart to a photo gallery. Although the quality of writing is varied (and sometimes pretty poor) between these chapters, and differences in terminology and coding style can be somewhat jarring, these chapters easily justify the purchase price of the book. It’s not that there aren’t a lot of places on the web where you can find tutorials, but having them dissected and walked through in the text is very helpful.
Overall, I recommend this book. Despite its large size and slow start, it is quick to read and provides a wealth of examples to work through. Given that it only costs $20 on Amazon, it’s a very good deal.