Comments about oreilly Programming Firefox:

I just received the book. I saw the tremendous amount of code in there. I searched Oreilly's web-site for this code, but did not find it. Perhaps it is in the 'free' Safari service?
But I can't imagine how anybody would dare to call a
thing 'free', if he demands personal data before enabling access to it, without ever saying what he eventually will do with the data.

Comments about oreilly Programming Firefox:

Sorry, Oreilly, hate to be so negative, but I've come to expect a lot better than this.

When I chose this book, I was expecting the quick, pithy introduction to the subject that I am used to from the many OReilly books that I have read and profited from in the past.

However this book makes a number of critical mistakes.

It is far too closely tied to the example application that is developed throughout its course. I want to learn XUL and firefox, as advertised on the cover.

I shouldn't need to understand and install PHP, Apache and MySql in order to get the sample application up and running. In any case, the hasty explanations of these peripheral technologies whould not,IMHO, have been enough to get the uninitiated up and running.

In the text there is way too much code listing which makes it very hard to follow and rather a tedious read.

Worst of all, the code samples on the web-site are extaordinarily skimpy. I'm used to being able to spend a couple of hours reading the first few chapters of an OReilly book, then using the sample code as a quick-start to building my own apps. It was was not possible with this book. I read up to the end of chapter 6 then downloaded the source code hoping to quickly run it and adapt it to my own usage. However there was no useful relationship between the chapter content and the content in the example source code.

Unfortunately I really feel like the time I spend reading the book has been wasted. I hope that readers new to OReilly will understand that this is not up to their usual world-beating standard.

Comments about oreilly Programming Firefox:

This book covers a lot of stuff about developing applications on the Gecko-based runtimes from the Mozilla foundation. If you were looking for a definitive book for developing Firefox extensions (AKA "add-ons"), this isn't quite it, but it will certainly help.

There are topics covered that will help you in add-on development, like how to use XPCOM wrappers and nsServices* correctly and what they can do, but they are more tailored to people who would likely use Mozilla as a basis for a desktop application.