Coda's Bad Book

Today, John Gruber linked to A Coda on Less is More by Sven-S. Porst, and from there I read Coda’s Crappy Books by Jesper.

The short version: the "book" that's included inside Coda is The Web Programmer's Desk Reference (by Lazaro Issi Cohen and Joseph Issi Cohen, covering HTML, CSS, Javascript, and PHP), from 2004. And a lot has changed in this field since 2004.

When I reviewed Coda for Macworld last year, my initial draft of the piece had a paragraph about how I thought the included book sucked (for instance, it doesn't include XmlHttpRequest XMLHTTPRequest XmlHTTPRequest XMLHttpRequest). Upon further thought, though, the editor and I agreed to cut that paragraph; while I don't have a competing web editor (which would, obviously, disqualify me from fairly judging the app), I do have a competing book, and so it wouldn't be fair for me to comment on the quality (or lack thereof) in the included materials.

But I have to say that I very much appreciate it when I see others agree with what I wanted to put in that review.

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