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updated by JMH on August 28, 2023 at 8:41 AM
Feedback on MASTERING BOOTSTRAP 4 by Jakobus and Marah
Jesse M. Heines, Professor Emeritus
Richard A. Miner School of Information and Computer Sciences
University of Massachusetts Lowell
Jesse_Heines@uml.edu
978-821-9626 mobile
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General Problems
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1. The font size of the figure captions is far too small.
2. There are many instances in the code listings where lines are broken at hyphens. This
is simply not acceptable. In class and id names and other tag attributes, a hyphen is
simply another character. Breaking the line at the hyphen will result in a syntax
error when the code is run.
3. To make the code usable in a class discussion, the code must have line numbers.
4. There are only a few references to the specific example HTML file for code presented
in the book. That is, one usually has to use trial and error to figure out which HTML
file contains the code discussed on specific pages in the book.
In addition, see the note below regarding errors in the
tags of code
files, further complicating this issue.
5. There are several instances in which the example code printed in the book does not
match the code in the supplied HTML files.
6. There are several instances in which either the example code printed in the book or
the actual code supplied in the HTML files does not produce the output shown in the
corresponding book figure.
7. Several book figures are so severely reduced in size that it is impossible to see the
output properly, particularly where text is involved.
8. There is considerable extraneous code in many of the example HTML files that
obfuscates the point of the example.
9. The code examples in MasteringBootstrap4_CodeExamples.zip have inconsistent folder
names.
10. The HTML files provided in the code examples should not use tabs for indentation.
They should use spaces so that the indentation is correct regardless of the editor
that one uses to view them.
11. Those HTML files should also include documentation. It is appallingly unprofessional
to write code without any documentation at all, which is the case in these code
examples. In addition, it is unreasonable to expect anyone but the most determined
student to be able to decipher the code without documentation. This is especially
true because there are so many instances where the code in the book does not match the
code in the corresponding HTML file.
12. Another issue involving the mismatch between the code in the book and the supplied
HTML files is that it is often difficult to see where code snippets in the book go in
the larger program. That is, the snippets are sometimes presented without their full
context. One has to look at the corresponding HTML file to understand just where the
new code should be inserted, and when the code in the book doesn't match that in the
HTML file, the task is considerably more difficult.
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Specific Errata in the Text
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Chapter 2
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page 51, line 2: "prepend" should be "append". In addition, the words below in
square brackets should be added.
If we do not wish our columns to take on equal width but wish to specify a
viewport size-independent width, we simply append the col class with a [hyphen
followed by a] number ranging from 1 to 12 (just as in the case with the
viewport-sensitive col classes).
page 54, first paragraph under "What are wrappers?": The first sentence has typos
and the second sentence is a fragment. I believe that this should read:
In computer programming, wrappers refer to pieces of code that encapsulate or
contain another piece of code without exposing the encapsulated code or
modifying the encapsulated code’s functionality.
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Chapter 3
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page 75, first line of code: The line that reads "ormatted HTML:" is obviously not
intended to be there.
page 93, code at the top of the page: The