Posts tagged Friends of Ed

Book Review: Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook

Book Review for:

Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook

by Dan Cederholm

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

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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