Web Designer's Reference Friends of ED, 2004
Although the title makes it sound dry and academic, nothing could be further from the truth. It's a practical, hands-on book about building stylish web pages with CSS. There are chapters devoted to text, navigation, tables, and the CSS box model. But it's not just about CSS. Craig covers all the essentials for working with web pages. He hates frames, but acknowledges that they can be useful in the right context, and devotes a chapter to highlighting the pitfalls and how to avoid them. There are also chapters on choosing the best HTML and image editors, and a brief chapter on multimedia. As technical editor, it was my job to test all the code to make sure that it worked. It does. What I liked particularly about Craig's approach is that he doesn't simply give you the CSS style rules for a drop cap and leave it at that; he shows you step-by-step what each rule is doing. Consequently, you end up not only knowing how to create a nice text effect, but also understand how the rules interact with each other. He takes the same approach with pull quotes, navigation, and restyling the same content in different ways. My other role as technical editor was to make sure that Craig had got his facts right, and that everything was up to date with the latest versions of the W3C standards. Where there was any doubt, we pored over the specifications (not the most user-friendly of documents) until we were satisfied. The result is an accurate and user-friendly guide to all aspects of web page design that should appeal to beginner and expert alike. |
Web Standards Solutions friends of ED, 2004
One of the first things you notice on opening the book is that the Foreword is written by none other than Jeffrey Zeldman, the great-granddaddy of web standards advocates. As he puts it, Dan Cederholm offers "clear examples and no wasted words" of how to design clean, lightweight web pages. Whereas Zeldman's own book, Designing with Web Standards (also reviewed on this site), is more of a treatise on why such standards are so important, this is a practical guide to their implementation. It covers navigation menus, styling lists, hyperlinks, text, background images, etc, etc. Usually each example requires only a few lines of CSS, and in line with his principle of keeping things simple, Dan Cederholm shows you how to avoid becoming "class happy". If you don't know what that means, then perhaps you should just drop everything now, and order this book immediately. Being class happy is a stage that just about everyone new to CSS goes through (I know, I've done it myself), applying classes to just about everything in sight, ending up with markup that's almost as complex as the font tag soup it's intended to replace. Even though I've been working with CSS for several years now, I still found quite a few fresh ideas in this book, particularly on the use of less frequently explored tags, such as cite and q. I also found a lot of honesty. I was particulary wary when I approached one of the final chapters - on the controversial subject of image replacement. Dan Cederholm demonstrates three of the main ways of using background images to replace text, and highlights both their advantages and drawbacks, before going on to demonstrate how they can be used effectively in a way that doesn't damage a site's accessibility. The final chapter also shows how a site can be composed of both two-column and three-column pages with just a simple change of class. All very simple - deceptively so. |
Cascading Style Sheets: Separating Content from Presentation Friends of ED/Apress, 2004
All I can say about Matt Patterson's new chapter on tables is that it's a pity browsers don't handle the subject as well as he does. Browser support for the CSS table model is patchy to say the least, but Matt outlines with admirable clarity what should be possible, what is possible, and what to avoid. The csszengarden projects offer a variety of solutions to web design in an imaginative and attractive way. Some of the techniques used are experimental and controversial, but never boring. My particular favourite is Cornelia Lange's solution for a real estate site. Not only is it an elegant design, it's capped off with a stunning tour de force - an image map built with transparent gifs and CSS. It certainly blew my mind. The core chapters of the book cover all the basics of CSS - the use of selectors, building style rules, the box model, CSS positioning, and text styling. There are chapters on common layouts and how to get round common browser bugs. Steven Champeon also makes a cogent argument for why CSS is so important not only now, but how it will become increasingly so with the spread of XML. All in all, an fascinating mix of the theoretical, practical and experimental. Well worth adding to any web designer's bookshelf. |
Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide (2nd edition) O'Reilly, 2004
The rules of CSS are relatively simple, but what makes it both extremely powerful and potentially complex is the almost infinite way in which rules can be combined through the use of the "cascade". Reading this book won't show you how to design a site in a particular way. Instead, it will give you deep knowledge about the way CSS works, and the funny quirks that are likely to crop up, either because of the sometimes counter-intuitive implementation of CSS rules, or because of browser bugs. It's not really the sort of book to sit down and read from cover to cover (at least not all at one go), but if you do, your CSS skills will leap dramatically. Where the book really comes into its own is when you're struggling with unexpected results. Everything is logically organized, so you can sit down and read all about the oddities of floats, borders, or whatever. Owners of the first edition will find a lot of familiar material (CSS hasn't changed dramatically since 2000, when the book first came out). Many of the changes simply make information easier to find. The biggest change is the addition of a chapter on table layout. Yes, that's right table layout. In their enthusiasm for web standards, many zealots have declared tables dead, but they do have an important function (for laying out tabular data), and the CSS table model is not the easiest of concepts to grasp. This is an important and useful addition to an important and useful book. |
Dreamweaver MX 2004 Magic New Riders, 2003
The biggest disappointment is that Massimo Foti, a brilliant creator of Dreamweaver extensions whose name appears as the lead contributor, seems to have been directly involved in only one of the 12 projects in the book. What's more, it's a project that works in ColdFusion and IE6 only. It may be brilliant, but I'll probably never find out because I have no plans to switch my server to ColdFusion. If it were just one project that had this problem, it might be acceptable, but of the five projects using server-side technology, only one has been designed to work with all three main ones, PHP, ASP and CF. Another works with ASP and CF, but the remaining three are single-technology projects - one each for ASP, ASP.NET and CF. It's no criticism of the individual authors that they have concentrated on what they know best, but New Riders has let both them and readers down. "Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004 Web Application Recipes" by Joseph Lowery and Eric Ott came out a month earlier, and the entire book has been written so that everything works in ASP, PHP and ColdFusion. As a result, the book is bigger - and more expensive - but you get the impression the expense is more than justified. In spite of these serious criticisms, "Dreamweaver MX 2004 Magic" does have some very strong points. Stephanie Sullivan kicks off with a tutorial on using CSS to position and style your pages. Anyone familiar with Stephanie's designs will appreciate that it's a winner, and there are some very useful tips you'll pick up from it. Brad Halstead and Murray Summers (authors of "Dreamweaver MX Templates") each present projects based on using templates for site navigation, again full of useful hints. Eduardo Zubler brings his love of Flash to a project called "Flashing Up Dreamweaver", which includes a very nifty extension called "Flash Date Picker". This, in fact, is one of the strong selling points of the book: the accompanying CD-ROM contains Dreamweaver extensions currently not available elsewhere. Eduardo's extension inserts a pop-up calendar that inserts dates in the correct American or European format into a form. Another feature that will appeal to anyone who finds difficulty following just written instructions is that every project is accompanied by a Quick Time movie showing you how to go through all the steps. Although useful, I would have preferred the authors themselves to talk you through the projects, and explain things that aren't in the text. For my money, at least, the Magic series, while still attractive, has begun to lose its original sparkle. |
The Dreamweaver Developer's Instant Troubleshooter Apress, 2003
What this book sets out to do - and to a large extent succeeds - is try to answer as many as possible of the questions that frequently frustrate users of Dreamweaver, particularly when making the transition to building dynamic websites. You could argue that you can get similar help by going to the Dreamweaver forum or by doing a Google search. You could, but would you get the answers from real experts - people like Rachel Andrew and Drew McLellan, both members of the Web Standards Project, or Gareth Downes-Powell, one of the most lucid writers on PHP and MySQL? Together with Nancy Gill and Kevin Marshall, they look at getting ASP, ASP.NET, ColdFusion and PHP up and running on both Windows and Linux machines. They walk you through the installation procedures for IIS, Apache and MySQL, catering for whatever your preferences or setup may be. And this is where the book really scores - they tell you what to do when things don't work the way you expected. They anticipate most of the common problems - and some not so common ones, too. With two of the authors active in promoting web standards, there's a strong emphasis on making the best use of Dreamweaver's improved CSS capabilities, and creating sites that are valid and flexible, including advice on how to switch to creating XHTML documents. Once you start creating dynamic websites, you'll find yourself turning to the later chapters, which offer a series of instant "recipes" for some of the most frequently asked questions about ASP, ASP.NET and PHP (but not ColdFusion, for some reason) - for example, how to create a random password in PHP, tables with striped rows in ASP, working with Server Control and Code-Behind in ASP.NET. If I have a serious criticism about this book, it's a pity that the final section was left to the individual authors' choice of questions. Although some issues (such as the notorious "Headers already sent" gotcha in PHP) are exclusive to a particular technology, it would have been nice to see answers to all the layout questions provided for each one. The user level is described on the back of the book as "Intermediate - Advanced". I would describe it as more "frustrated intermediate, aspiring to advanced". Everything is based on Dreamweaver MX, but is 99.9% applicable to MX 2004. |
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This is my second collaboration with Craig Grannell, this time as technical editor (previously we were co-authors of Foundation Dreamweaver MX 2004). Craig is a talented web designer, who is passionate about web standards, and in my opinion, he's put together a very practical and readable guide. As the book's subtitle says, it's "an integrated approach to web design with XHTML and CSS".
Dan Cederholm's personal website and company are called SimpleBits, a name that could equally apply to this nifty, little book. For anyone already deep into CSS, this book is probably a bit too simple, but for anyone still yet to be convinced of the value of embracing web standards, this is likely to be an ideal introduction. It's also perfect for designers who've decided to take the pluge, but still can't get their head around CSS. Although Dan's approach to design is "keep it simple", that doesn't mean boring or plain. What he demonstrates in chapter after chapter is that you don't need complex markup to achieve elegance. By keeping things simple, the accessibility of a site is also greatly enhanced.
I was Technical Reviewer for this book, so my comments are not entirely impartial, but this is a welcome 2nd edition of a title originally published in 2002 by Glasshaus. Substantial portions of the book have been rewritten, and there are two important new sections: a chapter on how browsers handle CSS in tables, and six projects created by members of the csszengarden project.
Eric Meyer lives and breathes CSS, and he's passionate about teaching others how to use it. His books fall into two broad categories - reference and hands-on tutorial. As the title of this one suggests, it's a reference book, and the "definitive" is no idle claim. It covers just about every aspect of CSS as it stood at the time of publication (early 2004). Microsoft has announced the world's most popular browser (IE6) is not scheduled to undergo major improvements until the release of the next Windows platform (when it will probably be replaced with something completely different), so this book is likely to remain at least until then, and hopefully beyond.
New Riders released this book one week before Christmas, presumably in the hope of filling many Dreamweaver enthusiasts' Christmas stockings. Like a lot of things in Christmas stockings, it's attractive and there are some really good things inside, but there are also plenty of disappointments. The line-up of distinguished authors held the promise of some really good stuff, but I get the impression that the rush to get it out in time for Christmas meant they weren't given the opportunity to polish everything to perfection.
This is a book I never thought would see the light of day. It was just about to go to the printers when the original publisher, Glasshaus, collapsed. Apress came to the rescue, and now this book can come to the rescue of anyone struggling with Dreamweaver. First of all, a disclaimer, I'm partially biased about this book because you'll find my name among the credits as a technical reviewer.