HTML: Complete coverage of the HTML 3.2 spec, major Netscape and Internet Explorer extensions, frames, cascading style sheets, dynamic/layered HTML via either extended style sheets or the LAYER and ILAYER elements.

Java: Java 1.1 and 1.0. Detailed coverage of the 1.1 event model. Exhaustive coverage of *every* AWT component. Basic syntax, OOP intro, threads, sockets, RMI, JDBC, serialization, inner classes, double buffering, etc. Hundreds of examples.

CGI Programming: The HTTP specification (request methods, request headers, response status line, response headers, cookies). The client side (HTML forms, sending GET and POST data from applets). The server side (CGI environment variables, writing CGI programs in Java, a CGI form parser and cookie value parser in java, the servlet API, CGI alternatives). An overview of public-key cryptography.

JavaScript: JavaScript 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2. Writing cross-platform scripts. Customizing pages. Manipulating layers. Validating CGI forms. Animating images. Handling events. Regular expressions. Complete quick reference to all of JavaScript 1.2.

The text presents over 200 HTML and JavaScript documents, and more than 250 Java classes, which are also available on the book's CD-ROM.

Amazon.com Review
Becoming a Web developer these days requires expertise in a variety of disparate languages and tools and usually requires a whole shelf of books. Core Web Programming delivers all you need to become a competent Web developer in one massive text. It covers HTML, Java, Common Gateway Interface (CGI), and JavaScript thoroughly with plenty of real-world programming examples.

The first part of the book covers HTML 3.2, including the basic tags and more advanced topics such as frames and cascading style sheets. This section discusses Netscape and Microsoft extensions to HTML (such as using plug-ins for playing multimedia content and ActiveX controls). The tutorial to HTML is comparable to those in other books of this category and includes some of the author's tips for creating more portable HTML.

The next section covers the basics of Java from a programmer's standpoint, including the advantages of Java and how to access Java documentation and tools. The tutorial that follows stresses the built-in libraries in core Java, covering drawing images and other graphics capabilities. Event handling in Java Developer's Kit (JDK) 1.02 (probably unnecessary these days) and JDK 1.1 receive full treatment. The chapter on graphics double-buffering for smooth animation within Java programs is particularly useful, and the author's treatment of how to access the network capabilities of Java is perhaps unmatched. (Topics here include how to load URLs using Java's network classes and even how to create a simple HTTP server in Java.)

The third section of this text moves to CGI programming using Java on the server. The author introduces the basics of HTTP and describes how data are passed to CGI programs from the client. Though this section lacks a discussion of Perl (which is still the preferred language for CGI development), the treatment of CGI fundamentals and the basics of Java servlets is good. (Java servlets are an alternative--with some advantages--to Perl.)

The fourth and final section of the book returns to the client side once more, with a tutorial on JavaScript, the scripting language for Netscape browsers. Topics such as how to use cookies to store information on local machines and how to validate arguments for CGI forms help round out a successful tour of the technologies that developers need to program on the Web.