A web development/programming blog providing info, tips, and tricks on programming languages, scripting, Linux, MySQL and more
Book Reviews
Web design and development books in the Tech Library
May 27th
I’ve always held to the mantra of “Never stop Learning”, especially with Internet technologies and languages. Now there is a lot of free information available on the Internet to help learn these things, but there have been countless books written on a multitude of subjects. I myself have built up quite a collection of print books and ebooks alike on a wide variety of subjects from CSS to SEO, Content Management to VB.NET.
A while back, I started writing book reviews on some of the books that I have read. This didn’t take off quite as I had expected, mainly because I didn’t write all that many reviews, although I have read plenty of my books. My goal is to eventually read and write reviews for all the books that I own, although is quite the undertaking with the number of books that I own.
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Book Review: Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook
May 26th
Book Review for:
Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook
5 out of 5 Stars for Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook
If you’ve read through some of my other posts, or even glanced at my Categories, you’ll know I’m a huge proponent of Web Standards. I also tend to buy my books based on other user reviews, as opposed to critic reviews. I like to get my review directly from the people using the book daily. This book current has a 5 star rating with 45 out of 52 5-star reviews on amazon.com and was a no brainer for me to rank it the same, for reasons I will get into later. This book was written in 2004 and a special addition was just released as well only 2 weeks ago.
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Book Review: CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions
Jul 12th
Book Review for:
CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions
by Andy Budd with Cameron Moll & Simon Collison
5 out of 5 Stars for CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions
This was the first CSS book that I purchased. I was always hesitant to purchase a book on CSS because most of the resources that I’ve found have been mostly beginner’s tutorials or instruction and I felt that I had at least a “beyond beginner’s” understanding of CSS. I wouldn’t go as far as saying I’m an expert at CSS, but at least mid-level to advanced. However, this book had some previous good recommendations from amazon.com so I bit the bullet and bought it. I must say that I was NOT disappointed!
This book starts off with a very quick introduction/recap of CSS basics including good code structure and organization, validation, DOCTYPES, common selectors including IDs and classes, pseudo-classes, and the advanced selectors such as universal, child, attribute and more, and some wonderful reference on the specificity and inheritance, or the “Cascade”, the core of CSS. Although this introduction is provided, it is relatively short at about 25 pages and I would suggest a good working understanding of these basics first, as it will help understand the rest of the book easier as opposed to trying to learn CSS for the first time from this book. The following chapter is another quick 15 pages with on “Visual Formatting Model Recap” including the Box Model and Positioning, two EXTREMELY important concepts to understand CSS properly. Although it is short, it is an extremely powerful section.
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Book Review: Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP: A Developer’s Guide to SEO
Jul 11th
This is the first of many book reviews coming from me. I feel that in the industry I’m in, the learning never stops. The web is a constantly changing place and in order to stay competitive, one must stay current (or as current as possible) in all facets of the web and wear as many hat’s as possible. I have a large, and ever-growing, library of what my wife affectionately calls my “nerd books” So be it. I’m fine with that designation. Many of these books I’ve read, and obviously the ones I havn’t, I plan to. Keep in touch to read more of my book reviews and recommendations ranging from SEO to PHP, CSS to Ajax, and more.
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