Peter Blogs » CSS

Web Design DeMYSTiFieD, by Wendy Willard – review

Peter — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 00:27:17 +0000

Website design sounds very hard. And of course it is – if you’re talking about designing the front page of New York Times or CNN or some such page. However, to learn the basics and get started with Web Design is something anybody can do – it’s just a matter of learning the basics in a way that is accessible and understandable. And that’s precisely where Web Design DeMYSTiFieD comes in – it is a handy, well laid out book that takes you through all the necessary and basic steps involved in creating a Web site!

The author, Wendy Willard, is an accomplished professional with more than 13 years of experience in all aspects of design, including publication, print, and Web. She is the author of the bestseller, HTML: A Beginner’s Guide, now in its fourth edition, and has written additional books and articles on the topics of Photoshop, Web design, and Mac O/S.

The book is quite up to date, and teaches all the latest website development tools, techniques, and best practices in a step-by-step fashion that seems excellent for beginners in this difficult craft. Web Design Demystified provides lots of hands-on help, which is exactly what you need to get started.

This is an excellent book for learners – it is not designed as an overview guide, doesn’t seek to cover the field from A to Z nor go into great depth and provide all the latest hacks – rather is has a practical purpose: To get you started! Nothing more, nothing less! It is structured to follow a basic web design syllabus for a community college.

To achieve this, it teaches you website planning and designing for screens. Then, it goes on to show you how to build pages, use and integrate HTML and CSS, work with JavaScript, PHP, and XML, and use templates. Also, it shows how to do design HTML e-mail and the basics of search engine optimization. And these are all things you need to learn.

The examples in Web Design DeMYSTiFieD are clear and concise and the explanations are good. In addition, the book has end-of-chapter quizzes and a final exam to help reinforce key concepts.

You’ll learn how to:

Create design mockups that meet the project goals
Add images and multimedia with HTML
Style text, lists, links, and forms with CSS
Integrate HTML and CSS for layout
Improve your site’s search engine ranking
Code HTML for e-mail

To my mind this is a great tool for people wanting to get started on Web Design. I also think it is an excellent book for teaching Web Design in hands-on oriented classes. It is simple enough for a beginner and teaches good habits right off the bat. I am sure you will find Web Design DeMYSTiFieD a good investment if you want to get started right now!

WordPress in Depth, by Bud Smith and Michael McCallister

Peter — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 23:33:37 +0000

WordPress is an enormously popular free CMS software, used by millions of bloggers: It is in the process of completely out-competing Drupal, Joomla and TypePad as a blogging platform. It is stable, easy to install, easy to use, and has a large and growing community of developers. Also, there are tons of “themes”, “widgets” and “plugins” available for WordPress, making it extremely flexible and easy to adapt to the specific needs of almost any user.

A large proportion of the users of WordPress run it for free in blogs hosted at WordPress.com. You just register, set up a few simple options and are ready to blog in minutes. And as you learn, you can change the look and feel of your blog with a few keystrokes.

Millions of others, like me, run WordPress blogs on their own domains and servers. For these users too setup is a breeze. Many hosting sites have set up utilities that make it possible to install a new WordPress blog with one click and filling in a few simple options. It is a wonderful system, both powerful, and relatively safe and easy to use at the same time.

Bud Smith’s and Michael McCallister’s book WordPress in Depth addresses both these groups of users of WordPRess blogs. It takes the reader from the most simple and mundane tasks, such as getting started and editing and posting your first post, to the intricate mysteries of designing and modifying “themes” (layouts) for blogs. Everything concerning settings, a lot of stuff concerning “plugins” and “themes” (how to find them, where to find them, how to select, what to look out for, and so on) is covered in the book, along with some much more sophisticated topics like CSS, PHP, MySQL, how to design and modify, and so on.

I am probably a fairly advanced user of WordPress, having worked with it for several years on multiple sites and modified some installs extensively. Even so, I found this book very useful. WordPress in Depth is a great resource, excellently written, and presents the material in a very nice and orderly manner, with a natural progression from the easier topics to the more advanced and difficult ones. In my opinion, this is a book every user of WordPress ought to have on his or her bookshelf. I certainly will keep my copy there for a while!

CSS in Easy Steps, by Mike McGrath

Admin — Sun, 30 May 2010 21:09:15 +0000

Cascading Style Sheets is an important language to master for people designers wanting their web pages to look good, load fast and be easy to maintain. In this book author Mike McGrath explains CSS and gives a good overview of how to use it.

CSS in Easy Steps is short and sweet. I was surprised by the amount of material McGrath has been able to get into the less than 200 pages of this book. It contains a fairly comprehensive overview of CSS with fairly wide coverage and with a very good presentation of the principal features of CSS. It even has a relatively good presentation of some of the new features of CSS3.

However, there are some minor flaws in the book. For instance, McGrath gives readers a basic CSS page layout using absolute positioned sidebars without explaining the limitations of this design at all. Designs with absolutely positioned sidebars are hardly ever used, and should not be used by people why do not know the problems of these designs (e.g. overwriting the footer is there is more content in the sidebars than in the main content column). Also, a few references or links to further explanations or more advanced examples or problems involved in using CSS would have improved the book.

Even so, this is a good and useful book. To my mind this book, written in an easy to follow style, with good explanations in plain English, is a very useful book for beginners. For more advanced users there is little new in this book, and it is far too brief to serve as a reference book.

The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, by Rachel Andrew

Admin — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 03:43:11 +0000

The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks, 3rd Edition, which is the full title of the current version of the book, is a good book on CSS. However, I bought it after having seen the ad for it on sitepoint’s site. I have to say I expected it to be a little more advanced than it turned out to be, and a little bit more a jour as well. The good folks at sitepoint are sometimes a little too good and to clever in their marketing, and create impressions that don’t usually meet the expectations. Almost to the point where I now finally have learned to divide what they write by pi and will most likely keep a larger distance to their products. Sitepoint should perhaps ask what they want as a publisher: Satisfied customers that re-purchase or sales that give customer dissatisfaction.

Oh well, on to the book itself. The book is quite good and covers CSS broadly without giving much in-depth coverage and very few references. Rachel Andrew provides a large number of good, standards compliant examples of how to use CSS in a set of different situations. It is a book that I would think of as very useful for people with beginning to intermediate CSS-skills.

The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks is a practical introduction and guide. The author shows how to use CSS for all the common purposes: for styling text, formatting headings and images, for styling forms and for user interfaces and navigation.

The book has a preface, nine chapters, and an index. Chapter 1 is an introduction to CSS showing why it is replacing HTML table and layout formatting, and the basic concepts of CSS. The other chapters have a “problem/solution” format dealing with various design issues, and solutions to those issues using CSS. There is also quite a bit of material about browser-compatibility issues, but some of this is quickly getting old as new version have been launched and/or are in the process of being launched.

The book is mostly useful as a practical guide. It is not very good as a reference book. Nor is it very up to date as far as the emerging CSS3 standards are concerned. This disappointed me a little, as most people creating web pages today or in the near future will want to use these new techniques instead of the older and often more complicated ones.

I recommend The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks primarily for people wanting to learn CSS that prefers to do it by solving practical problems one by one as they encounter them.

CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions, Second Edition, by Andy Budd, Simon Collison and Cameron Moll

Admin — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 18:52:49 +0000

Andy Budd, the first author of CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions, is renowned in the web development community as one of the foremost proponents of web standard in Great Britain. The first edition of this book was very good, but is already outdated, so this major revision was timely.

This is a 300 page book, very hands on, which demonstrate what CSS can achieve. It is a hands-on learning tool rather than a reference text. It has lots of code examples, is good when it comes to discussing cross-browser support, has some discussion of CSS3, as well as CSS3 examples, showing new CSS3 features, and CSS3 equivalents to tried and tested CSS2 techniques.

The book starts off with a discussion of CSS and its basics. Then we immediately delve deeper into the use of it – visual formatting with CSS, positioning, design effects, and so on. The focus is more on design issues than with the coding itself. Chapters 6 and 7 focus on efficient layouts.

The book is good at conveying best practice concepts in CSS design, as well as solutions to some tricky problems in CSS (two chapters are devoted to this). The section on dealing with browser bugs is very good.

This is not a book for beginners. It is more advanced and more design oriented. There are lots of discussions of fairly advanced techniques, which makes the book useful for more experienced designers. I would say it is an intermediate level book.

One problem with this book needs to be mentioned: It has a lot of typos and errors. The list of errors (available online) is now more than 11 pages long. If you can live with that – personally I don’t much like books with typos and errors – then this is a good book to learn from.

Cascading Style Sheets – The Definitive Guide, by Eric A. Meyer

Admin — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 18:35:18 +0000

Eric A. Meyer is a well-known and much respected expert on the subject of CSS. In this book he uses his trademark wit and humor to explore all the properties of CSS. The book covers CSS2 and CSS2.1, as well as basic CSS. It also introduces some of the emerging elements of CSS3.

I really enjoyed this book. It is very solid and an excellent reference for anything CSS. But it is presented in a precise and concise manner with a huge smile. Eric Meyer seems to have enjoyed writing the book. And that actually makes the book more intesting. The examples – of which there are many – are sometimes funny, and his comments interesting.

Don’t get me wrong – this is a great reference book. And all reference books are to some extent boring – because they cover so much, and always deal with a lot you already know. And this book does all that. But Meyer shows that it is possible to liven up even boring books a little here and there.

CSS: The Definitive Guide details the ins and outs of the CSS specification. It has numerous easy to follow examples. The illustrations are invaluable as they allow you to easily compare the markup, the applied style sheets, and the results. It is very comprehensive and virtually leaves no stone unturned.

If you want to learn more about the newer versions of CSS or you want to have a few really good in-depth reference books on CSS around, then this is a book I strongly recommend. One of the top books on CSS. Really a Definite Guide!

Bulletproof Web Design: Improving flexibility and protecting against worst-case scenarios with XHTML and CSS (2nd Edition), by Dan Cederholm

Admin — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 19:16:55 +0000

Dan Cederholm is one of the smartest minds in CSS and HTML. He is internationally known as a deep and innovative coder. He has been working on real-world sites for no-nonsense businesses like Google, ESPN, and Fast Company, Inc. He embraces flexible, adaptable design using Web standards through his design work, writing, and speaking. Dan is the author of two best-selling books: Bulletproof Web Design and Web Standards Solutions. Dan also runs the popular weblog SimpleBits, where he writes articles and commentary on the Web, technology, and life. He also plays a mean ukulele and occasionally wears a baseball cap.

In this book Cederholm examines a number of the real world challenges that Web designs are exposed to, and seeks to show how designs can be coded using CSS so that they become “bulletproof”.

And Bulletproof Web Design does an incredible job of teaching that – step-by-step, by showing you how to make your website `Bulletproof.’ Cederholm introduces the book by defining what it means to have a bulletproof website. He uses the example of a police officer wearing a bulletproof vest. No, it is not 100% protection against a bullet – but it decreases the chances and gives extra protection. When applied to a website, this means that your website can handle the `bullets’ being thrown at it. These are things like text resizing, use of assistive devices, no CSS, no images, and a few other examples.

This is a wonderful book, where Cederholm deals with coding and design problems all the way from multi-column layouts that stay crispy in milk, to maintaining fine control of web fonts and sizes without alienating users. I have just finished reading it, and I liked it a lot. It is very useful and practically oriented. Just about every problem a modern web designer faces is examined, with solutions ranging from good to better to best.

Cederholm’s point is that no matter how visually appealing or content-packed a Web site may be; if it’s not adaptable to a variety of situations and reaching the widest possible audience, it isn’t really succeeding. So he outlines standards-based strategies for building designs that provide flexibility, readability, and user control – key components of every successful site. Each chapter starts out with an example of a good looking, great site – that employs a traditional HTML-based approach and is not bulletproof. Then Dan then deconstructs it, pointing out its limitations. He then gives the site a make-over using XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), so you can see how to replace bloated code with lean markup and CSS for fast-loading sites that are accessible to all users.

Finally, in the last part of the book, he covers several popular fluid and elastic-width layout techniques and pieces together all of the page components discussed in prior chapters into a single-page template.

Bulletproof Web Design is a nice, useful reference as well as a great source for inspiration.

CSS: The Missing Manual, by David McFarland

Peter — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 21:40:28 +0000

This is a CSS-bible you will probably sooner or later need. You may as well get it now! It has 500 pages of CSS help, with more than 100 pages of practical tutorials to guide you through the process of implementing and refining CSS to save you many a wasted hour.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is here to stay. But CSS isn’t just a tool to pretty up your site; it’s a reliable method for handling all kinds of presentational issues on your site: from fonts and colors to page layout. CSS: The Missing Manual explains this powerful design language in a clear, logical, easy to grasp manner, and shows how you can use it to build sparklingly new Web sites or refurbish old sites that are ready for an upgrade.

Author David McFarland (who is also the bestselling author of O’Reilly’s Dreamweaver CS4: The Missing Manual) combines clear explanations, great examples, good humor, and step-by-step tutorials to show you how design sites with CSS that work consistently across browsers. You learn:

Create HTML that’s simpler and is search-engine friendly
Turn HTML links into complex and attractive navigation bars
Style images to create effective photo galleries and special effects
Make HTML forms look great
Overcome browser bugs
Create complex layouts using CSS

A wonderful book, and a great reference manual!

Link to this book at amazon US and amazon UK.