Using Elevate Web Builder Book Review

Using Elevate Web Builder Book Review 2nd edition by Erick Engelke

Erick Engelke has written the first ever book about using the Elevate Web Builder product from Elevate Software.

What is Elevate Web Builder ?

Elevate Web Builder is a visual rapid application development environment for web applications. It is simple and easy to create beautiful web applications by simply dragging and dropping components on to forms, and then changing their appearance and behaviors as desired.  EWB is written with Delphi Pascal as the driving force allowing software developers to quickly build a web based application using a great software language.

Elevate Web Builder Book or on-line manual ?

The book simply provides code samples along with a description for the section from using PHP, JavaScript, JSON, etc.  It is a self published type of manual that retails at $59.95 (USD) as well as being charged taxes and could be purchased from Amazon.  The cost is a little high and should have been in the range of $39 to $44 but the self publishing world is becoming much more greedy.

The overall book should have been designed with technical people in mind.  Step by Step with simple projects go a long way in comparison to code snippets that tend to show but not going into deep detail.  The controls should have been in the rear section under the heading reference with the different syntax for each control.

By using a simple project which could have been a film history/description or a shopping cart provides the reader as to how to do something and what the end result would be.  That could have demonstrated why EWB is a rapid development tool for the web.

Some sections that were missing concerns on the operating systems that the project could be implemented on which is Linux or Windows.  The requirements to build any project using EWB or can the discussion on building a custom component for the product which is what Delphi is about.

One thing about a self published manual / book is that the images tend to get blurred and the font used could have been better.

The recommendation is that you review the book on line to see if it fits your need otherwise you can use the ElevateSoft on line guide which is limited and very much disjointed.  Using the EWB product is simple, you really only need to understand Pascal and have a solid idea on how Delphi works which the EWB does follow in rapid design.