You are correct, it was, as my dog-eared copy of O'Reilly's doorstop on the subject (http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9781565924949.do) can attest.

Hey, there's another one for the list: only '90s web developers know what it's like to have to learn new technologies by going to Barnes & Noble and buying a book about them.

Buy books?! who the hell does that. No, you would go to Barnes and Noble, or Borders, find a nice comfy chair and read until your eyes bled. You justified it by reminding yourself that the book was already obsolete from the moment it was printed so you didn't need to buy it, anyway.

Oh god, I still have my Javascript 1.2 book. =/

Part of me wants to build a bonfire and toss it on. The other part of me goes, "But that's a book. A completely useless except as a curiosity for historians book, but still a book."

It's not too far off. I've got the same one, and it's the only JavaScript book I've got!

Really? I learned about NCSA httpd from the online documentation at hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu and talking to one of the authors. Granted, I was at UIUC at the time, and knew some of the Mosaic developers as well. ;)

This is so true.

I remember learning Java from a book, and many of my lightbulb moments about programming came from reading code, not writing it.

  ns4 = (document.layers)? true:false
  ie4 = (document.all)? true:false

  if (ns4||ie4) document.writeln('<DIV ID="bulge"><IMG SRC="bulge.gif" WIDTH=49 HEIGHT=148 BORDER=0></DIV>')
  else alert("You must have Netscape 4.0 or Internet Explorer 4.0\nto view the examples in this site.")

I remember using layers. I was in primary school at the time.

It was a joke related to everyone falling over themselves now for distributed anything in the way that everyone fell themselves for anything dynamic back in the day.

... and Dynamic Drive I guess? http://www.dynamicdrive.com/ :)

OMG... Dynamic Drive was pretty much my go to JavaScript hack site. Oh the frustration when taking two little snippets and finding out they were not compatible with each other. And then the elation when you managed to rewrite them to make them work together.

EDIT: Holy crap... I still have the bookmark for DD (and JavaScript Kit at the old http://www.wsabstract.com domain) in an "Imported" bookmarks folder in Chrome. I'm not sure how many browsers those have been through over the years.

and then to see one of the browsers go down in flames after all the efforts.

But you gained a lot of arcane knowledge in the end, https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.infosystems.www...