This book is a good introduction for techniques that lead to more manageable web development across multiple devices (responsive web design).

While I don't consider it a complete reference (assuming that like me, you are used to doing web development for desktops: this is not the only book you should read on mobile web development... if you are looking for a complete package, look elsewhere), I find it to be a pretty good start that will get you grounded on some core principles that will allow you to reach a broader range of devices with less effort.

More than that however, this book is about the practical reality of responsive web development and the author does a good job at covering the technologies (either build into the browser or as an addon for those areas where the browser haven't caught up with the techniques) you'll need to get things done. He almost always mentions several technologies you can use and usually follows with an example implemented in one of the technologies. That being said, be prepared do to some research to figure out which the technologies he presents is right for you and to get a deeper understanding of those technologies beyond the overview given in the book.

The book really focuses on responsive web design, not html or css or javascript. As such, I highly recommend that you brush up on those topics if you are not comfortable with them (well, you can skip the javascript, the book makes very little use of it).

Overall, this books almost reads like a web page as it relies a lot on outside content to explain the nitty-gritty side of things. While it is only 150 pages, you'll have a lot more to read if you go through a lot of the content that the book links to (and you should to get the most out of this book).

At the time of this writing, the technologies and external sources of information the books refers to have aged well, but that may no longer be the case in a couple of years if the book hasn't been updated with a new edition.

The author makes an adequate mix of standalone explanation and explanation through examples to get his point across. Rather than view his examples as a whole web page and waste your time understanding the whole implementation (which the author doesn't bother explaining in detail), I found it best to follow the author along and focus on the parts of the examples he chose to focus on (which do a good job at conveying what the author wants to convey).

That being said, I found some of the visual illustrations in the book to be lacking. In the section on fluid grids for example, he gives vacuous illustrations of the fluid grid layout on empty pages and then actually shows a Microsoft web page on which verbally he explains the grid layout, but wastes a golden opportunity visually to superpose the grid layout over the page like he did with the empty pages. That being said, many pictures that author use illustrate what the author is talking about well (just not all of them).

Also, sometimes, I find that the author gets side-tracked a little bit. A couple of examples:

- It was cool to see the golden ratio implemented in a responsive manner, but I think that the less mathematically inclined readers will just get bogged down by it and miss the bigger picture (the core technique the author is conveying).

- At some point, the author spends some time covering the picture html tag even though it seems srcset got the upper hand. I do find that the picture tag is the more eleguant solution, but this book should be about what is, not what could have been. The picture html tag would best have been saved as a small paragraph and an outside link for the reader to read if he wants to delve in the politics of web standards.

- In the chapter about responsive content, he talks a fair bit about adapting the view on the server-side for different experience (using either dynamically generated content or different domains) which does pertain to responsive web design, but should also be old hat for anyone who has done at least moderately sophisticated client-server web development. This books is clearly not an introduction to web development so I think it would be reasonable for the author to expect the reader to know that stuff already (like he expects them to know css).

- In the same chapter as the above, the author talks about the human resistance in implementing RWD (convincing people at work to use it and adapting the work dynamic for it) at a very basic level. I didn't feel that part was necessary. My thought about it was: you don't need to sell RWD to me, I'm reading the book and if I have enough of an incentive to read a book about it, I can come up with my own arguments to convince other developers to follow the techniques.

And finally, I find that at times, the author use vague (maybe overly fancy esoteric terms that I had to Google... it feels like the author is showing off his vocabulary at times) terms when talking about the philosophy behind RWD. A literature major will probably get all of it. An engineer might not. Thankfully, this problem is not present in the more technical sections of the book.

Overall, this is not a perfect book nor a self-contained complete reference (on mobile web development or responsive web design) and it's certainly not a book for beginning web developers.

However, it is a fairly approachable introduction to responsive web design for experienced web developers that come from the desktop world.

It is a quick read and will get you on your feet and implementing some of the techniques for responsive web design in no time.

Ok, first of all, contrarily to what David claimed on the back of the book, this isn't an entertaining read.

However, I won't fault this book for that. Imho, CSS is designed to be used by both artists and folks with an engineer background, but neither audience are likely to be extremely pleased with the end result so expecting a book about css to entertain anyone is expecting too much.

With that out of the way, this book is solid if you can stick with it.

It isn't really a reference and advanced css users won't find anything new in here, but if you are totally new to CSS or if you learned css on the go during projects and you feel that there are gaps in your css knowledge (I fell in the later category when I got the book), then I heavily recommend it.

The author takes his time explaining everything in some details, gives pertinent examples (without getting too engrossed in them at the expense of what he's trying to explain), gives plenty of illustrations to show what he's talking about (which is important for something as visual as CSS) and even includes a tutorial at the end of each chapter.

Also, the author doesn't lose track of the fact that his readers will want to apply what he's talking about in real world project so to that end, he discuss regular pitfalls of css development (ex: browser defaults) and how to address them. He also does a good job at discussing in what context some features are desirable.

The book does have some flaws...

In the tutorials, I find that the author doesn't put enough emphasis on the end result he wants to achieve. He should show the initial page, then discuss what type of display he wants and then discuss the step by step approach to get there (this is how it works in real life projects after all) rather than only show what he wants to get at the very end of the tutorial.

Also, while the author probably covers 99% of what the non-guru will want to know, there are some slight gaps (for example, I would have liked to see greater coverage of the 'auto' value for some properties), but then I guess that's true of any introductory work.

Furthermore, the book does show some slight signs of aging as it was written in 2009 and it shows in 2 ways. First, the book covers IE 6 bugs in some details along with work-arounds to fix them and while this was relevant 3 years ago (when IE 6 still had close to 20% of the browser pie), less than 1% of web users use IE 6 now so it's no longer that meaningful unless you cater specifically to corporate users using very dated browsers. Second, CSS3 is gaining traction and the author only dedicate 1 fairly short chapter to it. I think perhaps the parts of the book that talk about IE 6 and earlier should be phased out and the pages saved could be used to talk about css 3 more for the next edition of this book.

And finally, the book does make sure that CSS beginners from non-engineering background (ie, artists) will grasp the material so the author does repeat himself a couple of times and at times seem to state the obvious which might frustrate some readers with a more technical background, especially if they have prior experience with css. However, there is nothing preventing those readers from skimming over the parts that get too long in order to get to the good stuff (the parts where they are more shaky) at which point they will undoubtedly appreciate how thorough the author is (I know I did).

So, this book is not perfection, but I think it's close enough to it (for it's target audience) to warrant five stars.

I've had the chances of reading some really incredible programming books (Scott's Meyer's C++ books, Mark Lutz' introduction to Python book, Bear Bibeault & Yehuda Katz's jQuery book, just to name a few) and while this is a good book (I read this one and two others and this is the best one of the three), it falls short of the standard of a truly great books (more on that later).

This book is an introduction to HTML5, not HTML (or CSS or Javascript). This is what I expected and it's better this way for new entrants who are already familiar with HTML 4, but if you have never done html/javascript/css, then you'd be better served reading a truly basic entry-level book or at least do a couple of tutorials before reading this book.

In terms of coverage for HTML5, the author does give you references, talks about the state of HTML5, detecting browser incompatibility and generally does a decent job at discussing the degree of adoption for the technologies he introduces in the book, though he doesn't do a perfect job, so occasionally, you'll want to take a look at one of the reference web sites he gives earlier in the book to see the state of browser compatibility. Furthermore, that part of the book obviously won't age well, so if you see that book without a new edition (second as of this writing) several years now, look elsewhere. Currently, however, the author also does a good job at covering technologies that have gained widespread acceptance or that are gaining traction.

In terms of pedagogical style, the author is a bit inconsistent at times, at least in the beginning of the book.

In the canvas section, he teaches with an example and while he does make an effort at covering important topics not discussed in the example, he does an excessively cursory coverage of those. In that section, you can see that the author is trying hard to be a teacher, but is getting a bit too engrossed in his own examples at times and not spending enough time talking about the API (application programmer interface) that he is using. For example, it would have been good to see how "context.transform" maps to the transform matrix and the sub-section about drawing text on a canvas is badly explained (I had to spend a good hour and some trial and error with the example he was giving before I got a good grasp of text placement in a canvas and more specifically, how to center it). It would have been better if the author had saved the example for the end of the chapter and focused more on explaining the API functionality like he does for most of the book.

The author does a better job at following an "explain, then illustrate" model later in the book which makes for a more satisfying learning experience, but still not perfect (the author does an adequate teaching job most of the time, but doesn't go into enough gritty details in certain parts, for example when dealing with exception for storage... Bear Bibeault's style of rigorous full API description from jQuery in Action would have greatly benefited this book).

The author does discuss tangent details or pitfalls (canvas security, the difference between svg and canvas when you scale, not abusing autoplay with audio/video, the importance of server-side input checking when discussing forms) and while some of them lead to "well, duh!" moments, all will benefit less experienced web developers (which deserve to be included) and many will benefit html 5 beginners. Overall, it shows that the author is making the reader benefit from his experience rather than just going through the motion. Details like this separate a serious pedagogical effort from the fluff.

At times, the author is pedagogically brilliant (when he illustrates how pixel data work with canvas for example or when he is discussing pitfalls with cookies that storage addresses) and most of the time, he does an adequate job at explaining the topic at hand so this is a good book, but the author also falls short of the mark often enough that I can't call this a truly great, almost flawless, book. Maybe a couple of revisions and later editions will make it so. It definitely has the potential to get there.

Note: While I read 90% of the book, I skipped over the geolocation section (lack of interest in it) and the websocket section (lack of support at the current time) so consider those sections not covered in this review.

All the songs on the album are at least good (as in, you'll have a craving to play them at least every once in a while) which is rare enough.

The truly great songs of the albums, I find, are "If I Ever Lost My Faith in You", "Fields of Gold", "Seven Days", "It's Probably Me" and "Shape of My Heart".

Of the above, all are in the greatest hits album except "It's Probably Me" and "Shape of My Heart" which are unforgivable omissions. Whoever decided what would go in the greatest hits album should be fired or promoted depending on whether the greatest hits album was meant to really contain Sting's best music or whether it was meant to be incomplete to milk more money off customers.

So if you are a casual Sting listener and want to get 1 Sting album, you should skip this one and instead get the greatest hits album even if it means you'll be skipping over 2 great songs and a handful of good ones.

However, if you really love Sting's music, this album has enough to offer on its own that you'll want to get it.

I read this book with some knowledge of Javascript and very little knowledge of jQuery.

By the time I was finished reading the book, I knew enough about jQuery to tackle any challenges related to client-side scripting that I needed to tackle for my project.

The book does a solid review of the core jQuery library covering anything I felt I needed to know about jQuery to be autonomous with the library and then some.

Everything is explained clearly and in enough details to get a firm grasp about the nuances of the covered APIs.

All the API functions are detailed using a full function specification with complete coverage of the function behavior, parameters and return values.

Tangeant concepts needed to understand how the jQuery API works (cross-browser specific behavior, various standards, some less obvious Javascript features, etc) are also covered along with best practices when coding with jQuery and html/Javascript in general.

Readers that don't know any Javascript at all might be hard pressed to follow (maybe read a couple of Javascript tutorials first at the very least), but for those who are familiar with Javascript and desirous to know more about jQuery will find that this book really is a complete package that covers everything you need to know to autonomously develop your own complex feature-rich jQuery based client-side code.

Note: The second part of the book (about jQuery UI) was of lesser interest to me so I only skimed through it, but it looked good too. This review pertain to the first part of the book covering the jQuery core library however.

Its a decent album.

For those who listen to French radio, you'll undoubtedly recognize "Pour une histoire d'un soir", "Inventer la terre", "Tous les cris, les SOS" and a couple of other songs.

If you're starting a French music collection, I wouldn't start with this album as there are other French artists that have created or interpreted a far stronger body of work like Francis Cabrel, Jacques Brel, Florent Pagny, Luc De Larochellière, Monique Leyrac, Patricia Kaas, Marie Carmen, Michel Rivard, Frida Boccara, Daniel Bélanger, Daniel Lavoie, Joe Dassin, Ginette Reno (to name a few).

That said, if you already have a good core collection already, this album is a good addition to have with a handful of catchy songs that you'll likely listen to often through the years.

Fair warning however, the album was like 25$ in a lot of stores. I don't recommend that you buy the album for that price. Thats highway robbery and you don't want to encourage this if you don't need to have particular songs on the album (but if you can find it for about 15$ or less, its not a bad buy).