Slashdot Mirror
Spring into HTML and CSS
Who's it for?
This seems a very clearly targeted book. It's directed towards professionals that need to work with websites, but do not necessarily have a software development background.
The Good StuffThe approach of the book reflects the targeted audience very well. The book starts by introducing a basic HTML page and then building upon it by showing how to add text and graphic content. The next couple of chapters then show a few more advanced subjects like forms and tables. The second half of the book then moves into explaining CSS, starting with some of the basic ground rules and then moving into applying colours, styles and borders to the HTML document. The last chapter is a cookbook of classic layouts, explained clearly and with code.
Even though I'm not a typical member of the intended audience, I found the organisation of the book very well thought-out and with a good sense of flow. Each chapter builds on the preceding one, with a small set of examples that are built up through the course of the book. Each chapter is broken into one or two page "chunks," as the book itself describes them. These chunks are small discrete explanations of aspects that the chapter covers. For example, in the chapter on images, the chunks cover topics like adding alternative text to an image, specifying its height and width and using an image in a hyperlink.
For me, the combination of the chunk organisation and Molly's writing makes the book. The chunked approach fits the needs of both learning a new subject without being overwhelmed and those that want more of a reference capability. This book is not written to be a reference work, but with everything being so well partitioned, it comes close enough to meet my need for a good reference work as well. Some authors tell you about their subject, but Molly really does seem to explain it to you. A subtle difference, but one that gives this book the edge.
As a book that aims to be practical, the examples were very well chosen. There are plenty of pieces of example markup and images of the resulting rendering. The markup is nicely laid out and the images are large enough to show the effect, but not so large as to interrupt the flow of the explanation. The other nice thing about the examples, especially in the CSS section of the book, is that the examples are consistent. The same portion of text, from The Black Cat by Edgar Allen Poe, is used throughout. I found that this helped clearly show the difference between the effects being taught. The text stayed the same, only the layout changed with the new style being shown. Very effective.
Groan!
My first inclination when I saw that the book was part of a new series called "Spring into ..." was to groan and wonder when they were planning to fire the marketing non-genius that dreamt up such a bad title! Thankfully the contents more than make up for the corny name. The only other thing that bugged me was the inclusion of two appendixes with HTML and CSS reference information in them. The references are annotated very well with practical considerations, so I'm only going to knock off half a point from what would otherwise have been a perfect ten.
You can purchase Spring into HTML and CSS from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
I reccommend http://www.zeldman.com/ for all your web-standards reading. He's even re-worked Slashdot using current web standards.
Based on the review, it sounds like this covers topics so basic; one would be better served by a resource such as w3schools, or something along those lines. I recommend the Zen of CSS Design, which I found to be a great read for those who have gotten the basics down.
stop whining already
The alistapart web site is EXCELLENT. It's a good demo of how to take inline-style-bloated markup and convert it into something much more streamlined.
Unfortunately, in the web projects that I work on, I see nested tables ALL over the place, and it's like pulling teeth to get some of my co-workers to stop inlining style everywhere, and nesting tables instead of retooling the layout using CSS.
According to the Amazon description, this book covers HTML 4, XHTML 1, and CSS 2.1...
Index dot CSS
Index dot HTML
Just the facts for me...
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
No, structure is defined in the HTML (or XHTML). CSS defines how you present that structure (the design).
Content is independent of both structure and design.
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Zeldman's book is good if you need to convince your boss that it's a good idea but it's alittle short on the "meat" part. He's a great writer though.
If you're really interested in learning about CSS it's best to go straight to the source [literally, these guys helped develop the spec] and get Bert Bos and Hakon Lie's Cascading Style Sheets: Designing for the Web , it's by far to most detailed and even goes into the design reasons behind a lot of the decisions made when CSS was developed. There's a new version out now, but if you've got another source about browser support and you ignore the irrelevant WebFonts and Aural stylesheet section the second edition is pretty much the same book but probably loads cheaper.
This book and the O'reilly XHTML book are the most useful technical references I've ever used.
http://quirksmode.org/
Amazing site, this guy has done some painstaking cross-browser testing for JavaScript, CSS and HTML and come back with compatibility tables and recommendations for everything from the basic box model (how browsers managed to fuck this up i don't know) to robust JavaScript that doesn't use crappy "if browser equals X" statements. Working with HTML/CSS and JS is highly painful if your project specifies that it must look _good_ in all browsers, so any tricks you can learn will save your life.
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Molly is an amazing writer, and she really knows web design. When I got busy and couldn't update my book "Special Edition: Using HTML 4", Molly took it over and reworked it from the ground up into a much better book. And she's not only a great web designer and writer, she's a fantastic human being. Check out her site at http://www.molly.com/
Serving your airship needs since 1995.
Main Entry: serendipitous
Pronunciation: "ser-&n-'di-p&-t&s
Function: adjective
: obtained or characterized by serendipity
- serendipitously adverb
Main Entry: serendipity
Pronunciation: -'di-p&-tE
Function: noun
Etymology: from its possession by the heroes of the Persian fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip
: the faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for
Therefore it was a nice surprise finding it in the mailbox since he hadn't requested it from the publisher.
His use was just fine.
webster.com, people.
'Life is like a spoonful of Drain-O, it feels good on the way down but leaves you feeling hollow inside'
Try to mimic the behavior of valign="bottom" on a td tag using CSS with a container of variable height. To the best of my knowledge, it can't be done without tables (or by cheating and applying a display: table-cell style rule to the container, which is not supported by IE) or using a Javascript hack. Complex grid-like layouts, where your content doesn't fit into a nice 3 column layout with a header and footer--basically anything where you've got to have things align with each other vertically--require tables to work. Tables will also 'give' when the content would normally overflow a fixed-width div. Granted, most sites don't need it, but that doesn't mean that tables for layout can't be an acceptable solution under some situations. See also http://www.mezzoblue.com/archives/2004/05/15/table s_oh_th/index.php
For the record, I advocate using CSS over Layout Tables whenever possible, but I'm not dogmatic about it either.
They are working on it.
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