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.
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Why pay good money for a dead tree-version of something that will soon be obsolete when it is available through the Internet, and alway up to date?
Try out fish, the friendly interactive shell.
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.
Wait, why is including reference material a negative? Isn't that an advantage to the user, all relevant information collected in one place?
To be fair, it's not easy writing HTML/CSS on the screen while having a million tabs/windows open trying to hunt down the information you need.
/. readers will likely promote this book to their in-laws who beg to know how to write/design tiny, no purpose websites. It will save a few weekends for a bunch of us.
Reference material sometimes just needs to be held in your hand. Not to mention that
Get your Unix fortune now!
To be fair, it's not easy writing HTML/CSS on the screen while having a million tabs/windows open trying to hunt down the information you need.
I can probably google what I need and find an example before I'd find it in the book with the index. I know what you mean about having a reference handy, but it seems that since Google, I haven't touched a single one of my reference books. All that LISP book does is collect dust these days. I don't even want to think about what might be growing on my Computer Architecture book.
/. ++
Because not everyone wants to read documentation on a screen. Some people like to have a book open next to their keyboard, some want something they can read on the train, in a plane, etc. Dead trees also have no need for power adaptors or batteries. Neither dead trees nor e-docs are better than the other, they're just different.
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
zeldman.com very cool-looking site, beautiful beige and green tones, but just like alistapart.com the styling falls short because of it's use of a fixed pixel width - in a large resolution (esp wide screen of dual head), it's width capped at around 800 pixels means it looks stupid as a narrow bar down the centre of your screen, wasting useful space, and on a narrow resolution, you have to scroll horizontally. worse still if you increase the relative text size, the width doesn't grow, so you end up with very few words visible despite all the avaliable space...
I'd say it depends on what you're trying to accomplish. There are still things that you can do with tables that you can't quite do with CSS, though the number of these are dwindling. IMHO, if you have to use a table for layout, it should be the most minimal table you can use, with the rest of the presentation loaded from CSS. Handwaving about CSS as a panacea doesn't solve anyone's problems.
yes, everybody knows about czg these days, and it's been posted at least twice in this /. discussion alone.
and in a world where well over 80% of people still use IE, you're a damn idiot to post "it works in firefox, just get all your users to switch."
cheating and applying a display: table-cell style rule to the container, which is not supported by IE
er... using the universally-agreed standard is "cheating", because a 7-year-old browser is too broken to support it?
riiight.
mi save tingting long peles bilong mi long Niu Ailan.