24 of 29 people found the following review helpful
1.0 out of 5 stars
Unorganized, Wordy, and Lacking Content, July 3 2010
By Randall Degges - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: HTML & CSS: The Good Parts (Paperback)
I'm a professional developer, and have only recently begun writing front-end websites (mostly as a hobby) over the past year or so.
I picked up this book because I was looking for a detailed guide to HTML and CSS which covered best-practices, code minimization, and provided some real world examples of what to do, and what not to do when writing large website frontends.
In short, this book did NOT live up to my expectations in the least.
First off, this book is just shy of 300 pages of content, which could easily be summed up in ~10 pages. The author is EXTREMELY verbose, and seems to drag on and on with every little insignificant detail in the text.
Secondly, this book contains almost no code samples at all. There are very few code snippets throughout the book, and the ones that are provided are small, not rendered with any pictures near them (which is unforgivable, as they are supposed to show how certain CSS attributes can display data), and extremely simple. If the author would have added images / diagrams to at least show how the CSS snippets effect the design of the page, I would be slightly more understanding here.
Thirdly, this book doesn't really discuss the 'good parts' of HTML and CSS. Sure, it has chapters labeled Good Parts, Bad Parts, and Awful Parts, but it doesn't actually draw any meaningful distinctions between what is good, what is bad, and WHY.
Over all, this book is not worth the money. It:
1. Seems quickly thrown together.
2. Is far too verbose.
3. Does not have enough code samples / diagrams.
4. Has almost no real content.
5. Doesn't explain anything about the 'good', 'bad', and 'awful' parts of HTML or CSS.
I honestly can't recommend this book to anyone, as it is not geared towards beginners, intermediate developers, or advanced users.
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Strategic advice, May 22 2010
By J. Cook - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: HTML & CSS: The Good Parts (Paperback)
This book gives strategic advice for how to use HTML and CSS. It's not a comprehensive introduction to HTML and CSS; that would take a much larger book. It reminds me of the Effective C++ books by Scott Meyers: advice on how to make good use of the language, not a syntax tutorial. It sometimes explains what to do but not how to do it. In those cases, the book gives links to a companion web site with more details. If you have some experience with HTML and CSS, but feel like you're not using the tools as well as you'd like, this would be a good book to pick up.
I appreciate that the author endorses the spirit of web standards without being a language lawyer. Sometimes you have to make compromises.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Good Parts, Indeed, Aug 30 2010
By Tara Tallman - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: HTML & CSS: The Good Parts (Paperback)
I am a graphic designer who gets off on both right and left brain activities. I like working on code. I am not a developer, but I do enjoy knowing how things work.
With that said, I have been struggling for the past few years to say with confidence that I am a web designer. At age 31, I was starting to feel obsolete because I just couldn't wrap my brain around HTML and CSS enough to feel that I really owned it. I could edit bits and pieces of things. I could grasp some general concepts. But all in all, I was lost. I could play checkers with code, but I could not build things.
I was at that point when this book came to me.
This book contained the context (the why, and the how) behind the disparate jibbly-bits floating in my head behind a website.
This is not a book that will walk you through a bunch of step-by-step tutorials. Those tutorials don't help me anyway. Design and development are not linear processes.
What was helpful (for me) was feeling like I had an expert with a willingness to speak above my head *just a little bit* and pull me along into a foreign language. It's not an easy read, but it was something I could curl up with on a couch with some coffee and dive into. Did it hurt my brain? Yes. But in that sense that I was really learning something. And that feels good.
I highly recommend this book for others like me who are transitioning from being a print designer to being a web designer who knows how web sites work.