The Bottom Line
Pros
- Good coverage of the options in Firefox
- Clear explanation of themes
- Useful choices of extensions
Cons
- The tone is somewhat casual
- It's not clear what is Firefox and what is extensions
Description
- Chapter 1 covers the basics of what Firefox is and how it is a new form of Web browser.
- Chapter 2 discusses some of the more exciting features of Firefox.
- In chapter 3 you'll learn all about bookmarks, history, and RSS in Firefox.
- Themes and how they work is the focus of chapter 4.
- Chapter 5 teaches about extensions and some good ones to get.
- In chapter 6 you'll learn some of the tricker configuration options.
- Web developers will love chapter 7 and the extensions it describes.
- And chapter 8 shows you how to become active in the Firefox community.
- Finally, there is a CD-ROM with some themes as well as Firefox and Thunderbird.
Guide Review - Firefox Secrets by Chean Chu Yeow
This is an interesting book on Firefox. It's useful because the built-in help for Firefox is spotty in many ways, and it's such a powerful Web browser that it's almost impossible to know everything there is to know about it. I like how this book walks you through the various configuration options and setup features so that you can get the most out of your Web browser. It is also nice to know how to install extensions and to get a sense of what extensions might be more useful.
But I'm not sure why I would buy this book. A lot of what it talks about is common sense that you could figure out if you just thought about the configurations. And the trickier stuff (mostly in chapter 6) is widely described online. I think that a lot of people will enjoy the more casual tone the author takes in much of the book, but I found it slightly jarring. On a minor note, the last 6 pages of the book are ads, which made it hard to find the index, another anoyance to me.
If you've never used a Mozilla browser before then you should consider getting this book. It has a lot of useful information. I would read through it with page markers so that you can find useful sections later without a lot of trouble. You might also want to stop by the author's blog for more information on Firefox.
