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across this book, so I was very eager to get into it and see if it could

help clarify some of the gaping holes in the existing XUL documentation

within Mozilla. As an exhaustive reference to XUL and the associated

technologies that are used to build Mozilla applications, it was very

successful. As a higher level tutorial that explains the relationships

between the different technologies and their uses, it was not quite as

successful.

Chapters 1-6 lead the reader through the progressive steps required to

build and package a Mozilla-based application. The authors create a demo

application called xFly which is used as a test bed to show the different

features of XUL, CSS, and JavaScript. By the end of Chapter 6, this

application contains a tree control, a bunch of sample menus, and various

other assorted UI widgets. But it doesn't really _do_ anything. Maybe I'm

too picky, but I'd rather see an application that has some function, even

if all it does is play tick-tack-toe. Then, to me at lease, it's much

clearer how the different pieces would fit together in a "real-world"

application.

Chapters 7-12 cover more exotic and difficult aspects of Mozilla

programming such as the Extensible Binding Language (XBL), XPCOM (Mozilla's

component object model), and accessing web services from XUL applications.

These chapters are very dense in technical details, with good references to

online resources for further study.

Overall, I found this book to be a very succinct source of accurate

information about building applications with Mozilla. Its only weakness

seems to be that it focuses too much on low-level implementation details

without giving the reader (who may be new to the idea of XML-based GUI

application programming entirely) a good high-level overview of the

benefits of this type of development and which technologies serve which

purpose. Chapter 1 is the only chapter that explicitly addresses high-level

application architecture, and it is only 8 pages long.

The bottom line is that this is a good reference book for people who

already know how and why to build applications based on Mozilla, but a

not-so-good introduction and tutorial for people who are completely new to

the XUL-CSS-JavaScript paradigm of application development.